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Re: [News] American History is Preserved Using Linux

Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> __/ [ Mark Kent ] on Thursday 29 March 2007 07:21 \__
> 
>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>> Linux to help the Library of Congress save American history
>>> 
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>| The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain
>>>| documents relating to America's history are stored and slowly
>>>| decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize
>>>| these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish
>>>| the results online in multiple formats.
>>> `----
>>> 
>>> http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/26/1157212
>>> 
>>> Scanning work. Open formats. Free public access. What happened to the
>>> "Linux can't do OCR" myth? Google has contributed its excellent OCR
>>> libraries to the Open Source community and I think it made it into Kooka
>>> and other software.
>>> 
>> 
>> This is excellent, and is very much the right approach.  I remain
>> paranoid that we have huge archives littered around the planet that are
>> not, in any way at all, backed up.   This is a great start.
> 
> What's worse are archives to which to key (intepreters) is some secret code
> which may or may not reside on some retired programmer's PC. That code may
> also depend on other closed source code, without which there's no route to
> interpretation. And then.... then there's DRM.
> 

I can't see any Rosetta stone magically appearing to assist in unpicking
all the proprietary mechanisms which have been used to store all this
data.  You only have to look at the newsgroups which exist for eg., CPM
to see the trouble people have even now in getting old hardware working
as the source-code is not available for their hardware.


-- 
| Mark Kent   --   mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk          |
| Cola faq:  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/   |
| Cola trolls:  http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/                        |

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