From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Wed Apr 28 1999 - 23:47:37 MDT
Karsten Bänder wrote:
> Oh well, I'm looking forward to the day when finally all information is
> available online.
Me too. Karsten, I was at Yale a few years ago with a friend who
was an alumnus of that establishment. He showed me a library there
which houses a collection of books, most of which were published in
the 18th century. I was astounded there were so many of them, in
the days before automatic typesetting. As it turns out, one cannot
browse these books, as they are too delicate. I asked the librarian
if there is any effort to download their contents into ascii files, and
as it turns out, there is no such effort, nor most likely ever will be.
Reason: the information found therein is perfectly useless. There is some
scientific speculations perhaps, useful only to the historian, some
historical information, same as above, but the overwhelming majority
of the information found in all those old books: (have you guessed?)
sermons! If that is not bad enough, they are all heavily dependent
upon each other. With the more lax standard of those times regarding
intellectual property rights, we have jillions of versions of a very few
sermons.
I now suspect that within 20 years, *all* the information currently found
in print-only format will be no more useful in that form than the collection of
mostly sermons in the stacks at Yale. spike
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