Saturday, May 20, 2006

The Universal Library

The NYT magazine has a surprisingly good article on the digital library ...
Scan This Book! - New York Times

....Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.
It's pretty good really, but how could they manage to omit Nelson's Project Xanadu, The Memex (Vaneva Bush, As We May Think) and Dickson's The Final Encylopedia?

They give the impression this stuff is 21st century! It's very mid-20th.

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