Former White House Chief Of Staff Pushes For Comprehensive
Will The Library Of Congress Move Into Cyberspace?
For years, organizations such as Google, the Internet Archive, and the Library of Congress have been pushing efforts to digitize the contents of libraries all over the world. But the U.S. Government has not yet endeavored to create a comprehensive digitization program to preserve and organize the millions of books, films, audio recordings, and other valuable content owned by the nation. There have been small scale efforts to use photo scanning technology to immortalize certain collections here and there, but so far the prospect of digitizing everything remains in the future. Some argue that such an undertaking would be dizzyingly labor-intensive even with the latest technology at hand. There is no arguing that the task would be less than Herculean, but there are many who believe it would be well worth the effort.
John Podesta, the former transition team co-chair for President Obama, and White House Chief of Staff for President Clinton, believes that “the vast holdings of the federal government” should be digitized and catalogued in what he calls a “Digital Library of Congress.” The founder of the Center for American Progress, Podesta has partnered with public.resource.org to petition the White House to build this digital library by scanning content that is currently stashed away in places like the Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives, unavailable to the American public.
Podesta is calling the initiative “Yes We Scan,” perhaps in hopes to win over the current administration and gain support. He believes that universal access to the nation’s vast resources would have profound effect on research and education in this country. Although technologies like photo scanning and text-recognition would certainly be involved, Podesta has left the exact strategy for attaining his lofty goals up for debate, encouraging the White House to craft a strategy to get the job done. In a recent letter to the White House, Podesta referred to Thomas Jefferson’s famous decision to donate his library to the government of the United States. Podesta suggests that the current administration could help realize Jefferson’s vision of government as an agency for the diffusion of knowledge for the good of humankind.
Tags: photo scanning
