What the web was waiting for?
In the May edition of Technology Review, there is an article about Google planning to convert the full text of millions of library books into searchable web pages. Experts now say this is how will libraries function in 2020 or 2050, once Google (or its successors) have finished digitizing the world's printed knowledge.
This is great and this is exactly what I thought the web was going to be like from the start. I remember when I first started hearing about this "world wide web" and "information superhighway" that you'd be able to go into (virtually, of course) any library in the world and read a book. I thought it was going to be a similar case to compact discs, which were advertised as that you could soak them in beer, drive a car over them and they'd still owrk. Logistically, publishing all the books in the world libraries as searchable web pages is obviously more difficult than people first thought as you have to enter all this information and I dread to think how many individual pages of text there are in any given library. Even scanned with a good program to do so, the pages would all need to be proof read before publishing. The whole task is a dauting one, to say the least but at least Google are making positive steps that will, eventually, benefit the human race (our children included), by making these books available to the whole world (well, everyone with a computer at least). Here's the article.
This is great and this is exactly what I thought the web was going to be like from the start. I remember when I first started hearing about this "world wide web" and "information superhighway" that you'd be able to go into (virtually, of course) any library in the world and read a book. I thought it was going to be a similar case to compact discs, which were advertised as that you could soak them in beer, drive a car over them and they'd still owrk. Logistically, publishing all the books in the world libraries as searchable web pages is obviously more difficult than people first thought as you have to enter all this information and I dread to think how many individual pages of text there are in any given library. Even scanned with a good program to do so, the pages would all need to be proof read before publishing. The whole task is a dauting one, to say the least but at least Google are making positive steps that will, eventually, benefit the human race (our children included), by making these books available to the whole world (well, everyone with a computer at least). Here's the article.
2 Comments:
You told me you had always been dreaming about a global porn network and that this finally became reality through internet, you never mentioned anything about books and libraries.
I might be wrong, but I don´t think so....
That IS what I'm talking about...just imagine it. Sorry for any confusion.
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