Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress | Hacker News Reader

Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress

loc.gov

32 pointsmdlincoln6 comments

this sounds like a very bad idea, yes if it could be kept secure in fidelity, good but left open to manipulation editing and censorship bad very bad! i view LOC as the pulse and collective memory of our nation. The LOC is one of the many checks and balances that make it possible for the people to recognize and deal with an unjust government or sociopathic president that managed to trick itself into office. why would the physical library be kept in existence if everyone accesses remotely by browser? why would the public require physical access if they have an online reading room. How would the public know they are reading from the LOC and not some heavily manipulated proxy?

Very good questions, indeed, not sure if there are solutions, except hashing the content and storing the hashes somewhere physically in multiple places/countries.

You can censor a physical library too, so this isn't super relevant to the library's lean towards physical or digital media. As someone who uses the LoC catalog, it's amazing how slow it is, I buy an eBook dated 2016, and LoC maybe has a stub record for the book as something it hasn't received yet.

There's huge value in electronic submission and electronic availability of resources which could really make the LoC useful to the modern everyday American. The LoC will surely always get physical copies of content of significant note, but plenty of trivial media entries with little historical value, a.k.a. "how to use this recent JavaScript framework" are likely better handled and retained digitally.

> why would the public require physical access if they have an online reading room.

Respectfully, I really disagree with this line of thought:

* Having digital facsimiles of your collection makes it more accessible and more available

* More people knowing about your collection means more foot traffic

* Some things about a collection can't be discovered from a digitized copy; having a record of the digitized copy encourages researchers to come in and see the real deal

* Maybe scholarship doesn't have to happen IRL? See Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad: a fantastic novel that was researched primarily online [0]

0. https://newsandfeatures.uncg.edu/grant-expand-digital-librar...

Can they start my fixing their craptastic new logo? Hard to be excited moving forward for a org that cant even get basic typesetting right. 'LIBRARY Library of Congress' looks absolutely terrible.

Don’t expect this done anytime soon with the furlough

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