
Keepers of the Secrets - diodorus
https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/09/20/keepers-of-the-secrets/
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foreigner
The article is meant to be romantic but all I can think is how much better it
would be if they digitally recorded the data. Take pictures of every page, OCR
and then index. Being able to find what you're looking for easily may not be
as romantic but think how much better the research could be and what insight
could be gained from having the information easily accessible.

~~~
ColanR
what you said is true, but reminds me of one of the last paragraphs of the
article.

> Lannon said that Google had changed the way people sought information. “They
> only want information based on the information they think they want,” he
> said. As a rule, he said, archivists at the library should give you the box
> you’ve asked for — but also suggest another box. There are fewer
> opportunities, now, to stumble into a world you don’t already know. “It’s
> important to look outside of your own existence.”

~~~
forapurpose
IIRC ... the Library of Congress Classification system, widely used by
libraries to organize their books, is designed in part to facilitate
serendipity: You find the book you expect, and you find unexpected related
books and subjects nearby.

I wonder if anyone has studied how online reference, including search engines
and reference sources like Wikipedia, could be organized that way. Of course,
these days some people think narrow-mindedness is a virtue.

~~~
nerdponx
Eh? Wikipedia and StackOverflow are practically black holes of serendipity.
Not to mention Reddit, Hacker News, and other places where people genuinely do
search for things.

~~~
ColanR
They are, but not in the same way. Look up "black hole" on wikipedia, you get
serendipitous info on particles, spacetime, gravitation, etc. If you look it
up in the Library of Congress, you get: "A stars, Asymptotic giant branch
stars, B stars, Be stars, Black holes, Blue stragglers, Brightest stars, Brown
dwarfs, Cool stars, Delta Scuti stars, Dwarf novae, Dwarf stars, and Early
stars."

I think the second set of results is a more useful serendipidy.

[https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=9410&rec...](https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=9410&recCount=25&recPointer=1&bibId=1196872)

[https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCC/Q-outline.pdf](https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCC/Q-outline.pdf)

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javiramos
Fascinating story. This sentence gave me an uneasy feeling: "These collections
aren’t digitized. The only way to find out what’s inside them is to ask for a
particular box" It's scary to know that all this knowledge and history could
disappear with a simple fire or flood. Like the Alexandria library.

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forapurpose
Like several commenters, I thought digitization seemed like an obvious
solution: Not only does it improve availability by many orders of magnitude
(find and access a box in one phyiscal location vs. search and read from
anywhere in the world), but then you can bring to bear all the tools of IT:
Search, copy, backup, save, share, annotate, use analytics, organize (the
users and archivists can organize the data by multiple schemes
simultaneously), etc. But I've learned never to believe that many people
looking at a problem for a long time have all overlooked an 'obvious' solution
that came to my mind in the first 30 seconds, so the question is: Why aren't
they digitizing?

The seminal paper cited in the article[0] - which was more interesting than
the article, IMHO - helped me understand: They have very limited resources,
and digitizing is expensive. Perhaps the technology world would help by
reducing the cost of digitizing, so that they could by default digitize
everything and then sort through it (giving the archivist far better tools and
making the unprocessed data available for researchers to search). I wonder
what that would take - Are the solutions out there? Too expensive? what do the
Internet Archive and Google Books do and are those solutions applicable?

Some excerpts from the paper: First, from a list of alternatives for
prioritization, you can see the choices they have to make.

 _4.2 Putting more resources into digitizing collection material and putting
it on the web, even if that means fewer collections will be accessible._

And addressing the issue more broadly:

 _Has digitization changed the rules? After all, more detailed description—
the closer to item level the better—greatly facilitates the selection of
material to be digitized. If the goal is to find discrete, interesting items
amid tens of thou- sands of feet of collections, it is necessary to first ask
whether our immense appli- cation of detailed description can be justified
simply to ease the hunt for Web-site eye candy. If the goal instead is to
identify whole collections, or whole series, that might warrant digitization
as Web-accessible research material, then the question becomes more
intriguing. A report for the Council on Library and Information Resources
states that one of the first questions to ask in any digiti- zation project is
“Does the intellectual quality of the source material warrant the level of
access made possible by digitizing?”

One can posit this as a chicken/egg problem—how do we know if the col- lection
is good enough to digitize if we haven’t already described it to the item
level? But more practically, if arrangement and description of the analog
mate- rial depend on an initial assessment of the value (or intellectual
quality) of the collection in the first place, then finely processed
collections will by definition be good candidates for digitization and require
less additional descriptive work.

Retrospectively, the decision to digitize all or part of a collection by
definition makes the collection a candidate for improved analog processing.
“Digital resources depend on the nature and importance of the original source
materi- als, but also on the nature and quality of the digitizing process
itself—on how well relevant information is captured from the original, and
then on how the digital data are organized, indexed, delivered to users, and
maintained over time.”_

[0] More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing by
Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner [ [http://www.archivists.org/prof-
education/pre-readings/IMPLP/...](http://www.archivists.org/prof-
education/pre-readings/IMPLP/AA68.2.MeissnerGreene.pdf) ]

~~~
Asparagirl
One solution is for local/state/federal government archives to be better about
responding to Freedom of Information requests. The researchers gets the data
online, and the Archives finally get their materials digitized at no cost to
them (the requestor bears the fair costs of digitization, the labor, and the
shipping, if needed). Everybody wins!

Source: I founded a small non-profit that does exactly this, and we've put
more than twenty million never-before-public records online, uploaded to the
Internet Archive, all public domain.
[https://www.reclaimtherecords.org](https://www.reclaimtherecords.org)

