[HN Gopher] Have You Seen Me?: Missing Works of Nineteenth-Centu...
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Have You Seen Me?: Missing Works of Nineteenth-Century American
Literature
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 17 points
Date : 2023-10-28 07:07 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (commonplace.online)
(TXT) w3m dump (commonplace.online)
| cxr wrote:
| Does anyone know of a place where people request scans of public
| domain material that hasn't yet been digitized? Every time I'm in
| the stacks of a well-stocked library, I feel like I should be
| making the most of it, but the only thing I know of that comes
| close is /r/Scholar, and it's not a ready source of requests that
| are limited strictly to items that are legally in the clear...
| qingcharles wrote:
| Perhaps this place?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
|
| I am always looking for magazines that haven't yet been scanned
| for Magazedia (magazine encyclopedia).
| MollyRealized wrote:
| It would be a good question to ask Jason Scott of the Internet
| Archive [1]. When you hear of the Internet Archive swooping in
| and saving a warehouse of 1980s games manuals, etc., he is
| usually the one behind that effort.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott
| rudyfink wrote:
| Preservation is one of the central problems of current copyright
| terms. By the time the term exhausts--in the U.S., now around 95
| years for works for hire or life plus 75 years for author's works
| --the work may be completely lost. In my opinion, this will only
| get worse as we progress into the digital era. At least with
| physical copies, there is some chance an instance of the work
| might survive the needed gulf of time.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This is already happening in the magazine space that I'm active
| in. There are some magazines that appear to be completely lost.
| Especially first issues that were low print runs.
|
| Edit: Just to add.. some entire runs of magazines are being
| destroyed: nudist magazines from the 50s-80s are almost
| entirely being burned, because while they are legal, they exist
| on a borderline that can easily imprison someone. I know of one
| library that has hoarded 14,000 issues and scanned every one of
| them but does not allow access since the optics on such
| magazines is so maligned.
| ghaff wrote:
| One has to believe that, before electronic formats became
| common, there were a ton of niche hobbyist and other
| magazines that never made their way into a library, mostly
| ended up in the trash because the owners didn't want to move
| them to a new house, and no one has bothered to digitize them
| and upload them--especially as they're probably technically
| violating someone's copyright.
|
| I know I have copies of some niche things that aren't online
| anywhere as far as I know--and, absent digitization _and_
| upload--will presumably fade from existence at some point.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yeah, just one quick look on Craigslist and you will see
| dozens of people throwing out thousands of magazines for
| free just to get someone to lift them.
|
| If I had the space I would take every one of them, but I
| don't right now. Maybe in a few months. I'm going to start
| trying to raise capital to take them all and scan all the
| missing ones. Most magazines in existence are now copyright
| orphans.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Yeah, just one quick look on Craigslist and you will
| see dozens of people throwing out thousands of magazines
| for free just to get someone to lift them.
|
| The question would be how many of those are magazines
| which need preserving. You'd be wasting your time
| scanning old issues of _National Geographic_ , for
| instance; there are already comprehensive archives of
| those.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Some of these might reappear.
|
| I am currently trying to catalog and upload millions of donated
| magazine PDFs from various sources. One thing is that a large
| number of them are not OCR'd, so there is no way to search them.
| I am fixing that.
|
| Then I am feeding all the raw text into Claude.ai and trying to
| get a summary of what articles and authors are contained in the
| magazines. That way at least it can be cataloged and searched.
|
| It is mind-blowing how many authors actually had all their
| earliest works printed in magazines, not in books.
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(page generated 2023-10-28 23:01 UTC)