Thursday, May 03, 2012

Things They Should Invent: give the collections of closed government libraries to Google

Apparently they're closing government libraries.  Which is a problem in and of itself, but more distressing is that some of the collections might get thrown out:
Transport Canada's library is now closed, too, with seven workers informed Monday their jobs are obsolete. They will now spend months packing up and told CBC News much of the collection will soon be in the trash.
[...]

Some archives are being tossed because there is no central library and so many departments are closing their libraries.

Solution: any materials that would otherwise be thrown out should be given to Google. 

Yes, giving public assets to a private corporation is generally not a good practice.  However, if they are otherwise going to go into the trash, giving them to Google will at least preserve the information.  It won't be properly catalogued like in a library, but they can scan and index it like they do with Google Books, and at least it will be searchable. 

They could also probably be convinced to index the English and French versions of documents in parallel, since that will add to the corpus they use for Google Translate (which definitely needs the help - I recently saw it translate "Bill Cosby" as "projet de loi Cosby"!)

From the point of view of Google, this would be a major donation, so I'm sure the government could negotiate an agreement whereby in exchange for the donation Google commits to indexing it and making it searchable and accessible to everyone.  It would cost nothing, and protect our public assets rather than destroying them.

8 comments:

Lorraine said...

Oh, but is there not a Cosby bill?

laura k said...

It's hard to believe they're actually going to toss all that. Google is a good idea, and there must be other ways of preserving the collections.

The loss of these jobs is very distressing, as you note.

impudent strumpet said...

@Lorraine: That might explain why Google Translate is attempting to translate Bill Cosby but leaving Bill Hicks alone!

Lorraine said...

It translates your name into Dutch as "onbeschaamde hoer". Just the messenger.

Lorraine said...

Ooh, Italian: sgualdrina sfacciata

impudent strumpet said...

Oooh! I had no idea words could even start with sg in Italian!

It would be interesting to see if these google translations are the same as the official translations of Othello (if Othello has in fact been translated into Dutch and Italian.) I'll have to look that up.

Lorraine said...

Othello is Danish, right? Or am I confising him w. some other Shakespeare protagonist?

impudent strumpet said...

Hamlet is Danish. Othello a "Moor". I'm not entirely sure what that means, but the plot point is that he's Black.