As a comment to that article references: it’s certainly a great story, but it makes it seem that this is the catalogue of the library, when in fact it is one of 16 volumes, 14 of which are already known.
The referenced page at The Arnamagnæan Institute stays:
“There were 16 volumes of indices in all; 14 of these are in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, where what remains of Colón’s library is kept. The other two were presumed missing — but now it seems that one of them wound up in the collection of Árni Magnússon.“ [1]
It’s great that this was found (and one is still missing) but perhaps not quite as profound as the article would lead one to believe.
"After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato, which Wilson-Lee dubbed the “miracle of compression”."
I'm a writer, translator, and literary promoter. Sometimes I think I've never done anything more difficult than reading long works of literature and summarizing them faithfully in one or two paragraphs. It's absolutely brutal mental and compositional work.
What's your opinion about services which provides summary for the books, such as blinkist?
Do you think those services are an asset or that it affects the book negatively? Do you think, if the original author wrote the summary; it would make a difference?
I have built news aggregators apps which uses summary from original description of author & also built bots which summarizes content; I'm conflicted between the value of a summary provided by the author /reader. I know that a book cannot be compared with a news article.
From what I learned from listening to an interview with a Blinkist founder Holger Seim on the Factory Berlin Facebook page, they employ experts in the fields that the books are about to summarize them. So while this is not an author-provided summary, it is (seemingly) closer than a mere reader summary.
I feel a work of art is its entirety. Could you summarize Beethoven's 3rd in a few chords? Maybe, but think of the context you're missing out on. A novel exists as it is and it's more than plot. It's style and concept and form and feeling and sometimes you have to read the whole thing before you realize you got something of worth out of it. Sometimes you don't. But a summary can't possibly tell you this.
Well, it is not that simple. You no longer have the liberty to stop reading if you find it boring. You have to provide a summary, even if you don't understand or if the book is not deserving. In other words, what you once loved becomes work. Net loss - one hobby you might have truly loved.
The way you describe it reminds me of how I've heard video game QA testing described by friends who did it briefly. At first it sounds like you get paid to play games, but in practice it's not your favorite type, sometimes you have to do repetitive actions to try to recreate a bug, etc.
I had a roommate that reviewed porn. At our age it sounded like the best job ever, but he showed us his review sheets. He had to document the timestamp of every lick, rub, fart, moan, squirt, insertion, scene change, et al. He absolutely hated it.
I did paid beer testing for market research once. It wasn’t fun! Had to take sips of dozens of out of date beers, all the same brand and fill in long forms about each one tasted.
I've had an idea rolling around in my head for a while now - a mix of wikipedia, spotify, and blinkist. The idea would be book summaries, in written and audio form, for both entire books and chapter-by-chapter. They could be submitted by anyone, and ranked/upvoted in terms of accuracy and quality. Ad/subscription revenue would be shared with content creators.
Interesting, with a few different levels of detail, readers could get into a book in a "progressive refinement" sort of way. You could stop after your desired level of detail is reached, rather than stopping after chapter 3 because it got boring.
I wonder how far away we are for this being automated? I'm sure it could be done now, but accuracy, especially for more dense and difficult books, would be lacking.
I'd imagine there are some cases that would be fairly difficult for automation. Take a philosophy book, for example. I have no idea how automation would provide an overview of what happens in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Some written material requires going beyond the text and explaining the ideas themselves.
Wilson-Lee: "It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summarie"
It's exciting that we should soon get a window into the very first books that appeared after the explosion of printed matter that followed the invention of the Gutenberg press.
Im currently reading Island at the Center of the World about dutch new york, new amsterdam. And the source material is basicly one or two books because the dutch west india company sold their records as scrap paper. Rooms full of records, granted yhe papet were records over 200 years old. I wondet how much history we've lost
Are they solved? The quote indicated it had not been digitized and implied it would take significant effort. The Vatican library has never been digitized, and nobody really knows what all is in there. The HP library burned down before anybody digitized it.
The reason given for not digitizing it was "too expensive". That's the professional archivers talking again, overlooking that everyone has a digitizing machine in their pocket.
I wonder how many more libraries will get lost before people start being pragmatic about this.
the issue is your lay people will damage the books, or may not have access to the imaging technologies you need to read otherwise illegible text. For example in some cases with faded ink or very weak paper x-ray may be applied.
Oh phooey. Sure, some of the books need special treatment. But I'm sure the vast majority are more than amenable to click turn page click turn page click turn page with one hand on the camera and the other turning pages. I've done it myself for things like family albums, scrapbooks, etc. Piece of cake.
All this handwringing about needing 10000 dpi scans and advanced imaging technology means no scans will get done, and there'll be a lot of sobbing and rending of hair when the next collection gets flooded, lost, chewed by mice, rotted to dust, stolen or goes up in smoke.
I agree, I think these professional archivists are letting perfect be the enemy of good enough. There is no real reason they couldn't give a large team of interns armed with smartphones a crash course in how to turn the pages of a book without tearing them and set them loose digitizing entire libraries in days; then afterwards they could take their time with their high powered x-ray 10 gazillion dpi scanners or whatever the hell they'd like to use.
What we're seeing from archivists is a prime example of gatekeeping and job security.
>Now, with the benefit of today’s technological era, the Library is digitalising their entire collection of manuscripts, which includes over 80 000 codices, mostly from the Middle Ages and the Humanism Period.
This is such an exciting project. And the phrase "the Middle Ages and the Humanism Period" is a bit misleading, because what we may find are transcriptions of ancient texts long considered lost.
One of the most flatly incredible manuscript discoveries of the nineteenth century is a short treatise called the "Didache." We knew that such a thing existed, because writers as early as the 3rd century mention it, but it was presumed lost. An 11th century manuscript of it was found in a library in 1875, and most scholars now believe that the text dates to the first century, making it the oldest known Christian "catechism" (one which, intriguingly, seems to stand outside the Pauline tradition).
Obviously, this was and is an absolutely amazing thing for students of late antiquity in general and early Christianity in particular, and it had been sitting there in plain sight (so to speak) for centuries. It would surprise me not at all if we find similar things in the Vatican collection.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. Where is the link so I can see the digitized version? This should be the first step. I’m guessing they’ve done this and it’s just a click baity article. But if not before even talking to journalists they should have taken photos of every page and put them on a GitHub or other similar place. Otherwise they get an A+ for hilarious hypocrisy.
I agree, I logged in just to upvote the parent. Any copy is better than no copy, and if you don't risk damaging the original, I don't see the downside.
This pragmatic preservation was already on my mind because of something that happened last night. I was driving on the motorway when a drunk driver caused a huge high speed crash right in front of me. I have a dash cam,and it captured the whole thing. The police officer on the scene used his body cam to film the incident from the screen of my dash cam. I'm sure it was a terrible copy, but it was an immediate backup.
Of course he then collected my dash cam as evidence too. Their digital evidence team must be on point too because I got a thank you email within a couple of hours which said they had already successfully downloaded the original recording and were sending my dash cam back to me.
Historians could learn a lot from this, ordinary police officers operating in difficult conditions are doing a better job of preservation than historians who's only job is preserving and studying historical artifacts under much easier conditions.
I've always hated bloated PDFs that are essentially just images instead of text, but if you could release something as you describe, you could then split up the work between the whole world and have it properly retyped much faster. Maybe even get some translations out of it too. Perhaps the dreaded copyright laws may ruin this pipe dream, though.
Manuscripts are very hard to transcribe, and only get harder the older they are. You can already split up transcription work for printed public domain texts at the "Distributed proofreaders" website, which feeds Project Gutenberg -- Wikisource has a similar subproject, albeit one that's not quite as advanced. But neither of these will help for something as complex as this.
The referenced page at The Arnamagnæan Institute stays:
“There were 16 volumes of indices in all; 14 of these are in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, where what remains of Colón’s library is kept. The other two were presumed missing — but now it seems that one of them wound up in the collection of Árni Magnússon.“ [1]
It’s great that this was found (and one is still missing) but perhaps not quite as profound as the article would lead one to believe.
[1] https://manuscript.ku.dk/news/a-new-discovery-in-the-arnamag...