The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

Thoughts on new blog/wiki hybrids from the Library 2.0 blog.

Joseph J. Esposito has a post on the liblicense-l list at Yale wherein he makes some points worth bearing in mind:

My concern is a practical one: Some projects are incomplete in their design, which will likely result in their having to be redone in the near future, an expense that the world of scholarly communications can ill afford. There are at least four essential characteristics of any such project, and there may very well be more. Continue reading →

George Will, criticizing Time magazine’s choice of Person of the Year, notes that “Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction.” No doubt that’s a true statement, strictly speaking, but even a few notable counter-examples like K. C. Johnson’s Durham-in-Wonderland can excuse a multitude of sins, as far as I’m concerned. Johnson has done a phenomenal job of covering a range of topics at the heart of the Duke lacrosse hoax, from egregious prosecutorial misconduct, to the manifold ways in which members of the “Committee of 88” Duke faculty disgraced themselves (and now hope nobody will notice), to the spinelessness of the Duke administration. Durham-in-Wonderland is a credit to the genre and shows what a skilled practitioner like Johnson can do with it.

From Google library: Open culture?

The University of California, which also belongs to the Open Content Alliance, has no regrets about allowing Google to scan at least 2.5 million of the books in its libraries. “We felt like we could get more from being a partner with Google than by not being a partner,” said university spokeswoman Jennifer Colvin.

But some of the participating libraries may have second thoughts if Google’s system isn’t set up to recognize some of their digital copies, said Gregory Crane, a Tufts University professor who is currently studying the difficulty accessing some digital content.

For instance, Tufts worries Google’s optical reader won’t recognize some books written in classical Greek. If the same problem were to crop up with a digital book in the Open Content Alliance, Crane think it will be more easily addressed because the group is allowing outside access to the material.

Google “may end up aiming for the lowest common denominator and not be able to do anything really deep” with the digital books, Crane said.