Of course, this is a concept hackers have understood for decades. It's why Jason Scott collects text files, scans old arcade manuals, and why Archive Team rips the entirety of Yahoo! Video, Geocities, and poetry communities just before they're about to be shut down. And they then ensure sure they're available to all who ask. For free. Forever. On Bittorrent.
Unfortunately, the old stuff isn't as easy to copy. It's locked up in big places like my office, The New York Public Library. But cultural memory organizations, even if they don't realize it, are WHERE ITS AT when it comes to transforming all that documentation of human endeavor and into some of the most powerful, useful, and amazing materials going forward.
While we used to treat our super rare special collections as cherished things never to see the light of day except by a couple of curators, interns and a few handpicked researchers and only then in climate controlled bunkers. On rare occasions, the public sees them only as part of an exhibition, on display once every few years for a few hours a day. While this is great for the insuring the longevity of the object, it's not so great for exposing the public to tangible history. Now we're opening up the rarest of materials, which are often the freest in terms of restrictions (due to their age), making them public, and making them richer with use. Suddenly using the rare stuff makes it better with every use. Way better.
These kinds of places are among the best beachheads in the fight for Free Culture. Some of the smartest thinkers about the copyright fight are now leading the Harvard Libraries from the inside. John Palfry's the head of the Harvard Law Library (for a few more days), David Weinberger is leading the team that's writing the code behind the Digital Public Library of America, and Jonathan (JZ) Zittrain, who cofounded the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is about to become the Law Library's Vice-Dean.
Basically what I'm saying is that there are vast swaths of human knowledge and endeavor at crazy risk of being left behind. This isn't bit rot. This is real rot. Or sometimes we "digitize" something by just taking a picture of it. But then it's just a picture, not a page from an atlas with grounding in a a real time and place, and it gets lost in a photo gallery and a metadata system. And it's just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along and breathe life back into it, to make it something more powerful than it ever was on paper. To be fully indexed, crosslinked, talking to all the other information available, related, and relevant. That's eminently possible, it's just not being done at sufficient scale.
We need hackers in every position in these organizations. Here at the New York Public Library, we're working on that. We have one curator who hacks on Node and Backbone because it means he can better disseminate and preserve musical theatre (also because it's really fun). We have one curator who's digitizing copyright-free maps of New York City and is using it to basically create historical Google Maps all the way back to when Europeans first showed up on North American shores - or as someone just called it "Building guidebooks for time travelers" [1] (I'm particularly proud of that one). And now I'm going to move into the realm of shameless self-promotion and a plea. My team looks for cool datasets throughout the library and builds projects on top to transform them into structured data by any means necessary (often it's often crowdsourcing) then builds APIs so anyone can get to that data. We also build animated gif creators [2].
Basically what I'm saying is that those rare books, those archives, those old photographs need hackers to keep these materials around. To keep them relevant. To inspire countless others to create great works. And here's the point. We need so many more people helping us.
We need you. Not just at NYPL, but everywhere across this industry. Because how cool is it to hack on the sum total of human knowledge and make it available to all who ask? If this piques your interest, consider joining our team[3]. (Or work on this issues on your own and tell us about them.)
[1]http://betabeat.com/2012/06/doctor-who-companion-application... [2]http://stereo.nypl.org [3] https://jobs-nypl.icims.com/jobs/6882/job | We're not always hiring, but we've got an opening now if you want to join us