Ephemera is by definition written and printed matter that not intended to be retained or preserved. But six years ago the San Francisco couple, Rick and Megan Prelinger, dedicated a new library to ephemera of all kinds and descriptions in the Soma District of their city.
In their webpage, the open handed, unguarded access policy is startling for its clarity and brevity:
“We plan at first to open our library to others when we are there, and develop a model of service based on what we learn of other people’s needs. It will be an appropriation-friendly setting. Scanners, digital cameras, and CD/DVD burners will be available so that visitors can make digital copies of items of interest and take them home. There will be no charge for using the collections, though we are exploring charging for commercial reuse of the materials so as to recover some of our expenses.”
This is an amazing project for many reasons, including the fact that it has such an ‘appropriation friendly’ useable collection.
Rick Prelinger comments that “We have found that the divide between the digital and analog camps is real, but highly exaggerated by the media and by overeager analysts; and that print and electronic materials are evolving in tandem with one another, and that this evolution is retroactive as well.”
Making a home for the unwanted paper text has been the work of Aaron Lansky in salvaging Yiddish language publications at the National Yiddish Book Center in the 1980’s. His book “Outwitting History” is an engaging tale of how the acquisition program was born and evolved.
One wonders if the Google Library Project has plans to help these who are rescuing ephemera print from destruction.
We learned yesterday in the New York TImes written by Miguel Helft that Google is harvesting metadata and data from the Google Library Project to create the largest translation engine in the world. As Google has an edge of pattern recognition software to generate metadata, perhaps we will see the next Google project to expand to these libraries of salvaged analog text.
“Like its rivals in the field, most notably Microsoft and I.B.M.,
Google has fed its translation engine with transcripts of United
Nations proceedings, which are translated by humans into six
languages, and those of the European Parliament, which are translated
into 23. This raw material is used to train systems for the most
common languages.”
