November 19, 2004
Digitizing the Public Domain
a new project designed to either get some kid a bunch of record players OR to digitize and release up to 30,000 records now out of copyright into the readily accessible world wide diginet. a gutenberg project for music. information wants to be free. yippee!!! (from boingboing)
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It's a nice thought, but he obviously has no idea what he's doing. He should find some service that digitizes files for a living, and see if they'd be willing to take on the project for the PR. They could just do the digitizing whenever their machines aren't being used and they have free time in their schedule. As time goes on, they might get volunteers and/or donations for such a project.
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Another problem is deciding on a storage format. Digital formats come and go quickly, but analog has been around (relatively) forever. Beyond the technical process of getting the best sound off of vinyl, which is an art in itself, there's the decision of balancing lossy/lossless formats with the resources (funding) available for local storage and network distribution.
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Here's a good paper from the Library of Congress called "Research Challenges in Digital Archiving and Long-Term Preservation". This involves more than ripping tracks with iTunes.
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The person who wants to do this should really be talking to places like archive.org. It's a great idea.