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- Stephen Rhind-Tutt,
- President, Alexander Street Press, L.L.C
- Physical and Virtual Artifacts – Philosophy and Practice
- RBMS Annual Conference, June 21st, 2003
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- Background on Alexander Street Press
- Nature of Virtual Space
- How well can we replicate physical artifacts electronically?
- Improving access to artifacts
- Current issues and examples
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- Founded in July 2000
- Scholarly, electronic publisher in the Humanities
- Based in Alexandria, Virginia
- 28 employees
- 100+ licensing partners, including Warner Bros., Penguin Putnam, Faber
& Faber, Macmillan, University Presses, etc…
- Special collection partners include the Library of Congress, NYPL,
Wisconsin State Historical Society, South Hadley Historical Society, and
many more.
- Customer list includes: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, British
Library, Danville College, Northern State University and many more.
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- “You must consult the laws of
nature…you say “What do you want brick?” and the brick says to you “I
like an arch” and you say to brick “Look, I want one too, but arches are
expensive…” Brick says “I like an arch”…
- “Honor
the material you use”
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Louis Kahn (1979)
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- Steel – High cost to create, strong, easy to stamp shapes, medium weight…
- Wood – Low cost to create, moderately strong, needs
to be crafted,
light weight…
- Glass – Medium cost to create, weak, easy to craft,
transparent
- The Web - ?
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- Processing speed – by 2010 there will be 128 GHz machines
- Storage space – by 2010 1 Terrabyte of storage (400 m pages) will cost
under $100
- Laptop – under 1 pound, with full motion video
- > than 90% of all developed world will have Web access
- Bandwidth > 1.5 Mbs
- Wireless networking
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- ‘Quadricycles’, ‘Phaetons’, ‘Horseless Carriages’, ‘Autocars’, ‘Motor
cars’ ?
- Horsepower to weight ratio - Electric, Hydrogen or Gasoline ?
- Materials – Wood, Steel, or combination ?
- Production line – Custom or mass produced ?
- Starting Systems – Manual or electric ?
- Legal – UK law restricting speed to 5 mph
- Education – Would population be able to master the machines ?
- Costs – Typically in excess of $2,000
- (Source: Various Articles in The Living Age, 1904)
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- Motor cars
- Horsepower to weight ratio - Gasoline and clearly going to improve in
future
- Materials – Steel
- Production line – Mass produced
- Starting Systems – Electric
- Legal– Building of highways
- Education – No longer an issue
- Costs – Model T cost $400
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- Value in the electronic world is about...
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- More than a way to answer questions
- A framework by which users can be guided to
understand, explore, discover and learn.
- A route-map to guide users through data - saving time and effort.
- The intellectual fabric by which information should be organized…
- Delivers answers that cannot be asked elsewhere
- Enables artifacts to ‘take their place’ in the virtual world
- Discipline specific
- Oriented towards the user and the content
- At the ‘right’ level
- Thoroughly controlled
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- Print doesn’t perform
- Static, Stable, Permanent
- Reactive
- Electronic products only exist in their performance
- Ever changing
- Interactive
- Totally dependent on their context
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- All information (past, present
and future) to be available instantly, to everybody, at an affordable
price, with maximum functionality.
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- Approximately 400,000 books are currently available in electronic form.
- The vast majority of these are accessible in print, microfilm and other
media.
- Over 300,000 new books in English published every year.
- Google indexes the equivalent of 15 million books.
- What is the best way to increase access?
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- The experience of microform…
- Use restricted to scholars
- Low utility
- Local access only
- Relatively low revenues generated
- Web
- Significant public interest
- More funding available from foundations
- Concerns…
- Technical Issues Free access vs. For fee access
- Copyright/Licensing Standards
- Loss of control Metadata
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- The more intense the mark-up of a text the more expensive it is to
produce
- Higher levels of mark-up increase
- Functionality
- Reusability of data
- Re-keying in SGML costs approximately 10 times the cost of digitizing in
facsimile form
- 100 pages in XML or 1,000 pages in facsimile?
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- Option A: Link to resource
- Low cost
- Lower utility
- Changing URLs prevents access.
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- JSTOR – For fee
- Over 1,700 institutions
- Is providing ever more content
- Utility is growing
- Permanent links at the article level
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- Created by two academics from SUNY Binghamton
- 332,000 visits since 1998
- Numerous awards
- 30 document projects complete with 1,500 primary documents
- Funding sources no longer able to support it…
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- ASP will support the existing Website and provide universal access
- ASP is securing copyright from 25 different institutions from a wide
range of publishers and libraries.
- ASP will invest funds to double the number of document projects and add
more than 20,000 pages of material
- ASP will formally publish the material, so allowing it to become part of
the established corpus.
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- Reproduction will inevitably get better
- It will never replace the originals
- The biggest problem with this is that it won’t help us find, explore,
search or analyze materials any better
- The biggest opportunity for adding value is in increasing access and the
quality of access
- That’s what patrons want!
- Don’t seek to replicate paper for the sake of it – unlike paper
artifacts digital publications are evolving to meet new needs
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Notes
