Eosuchian Wordle

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בית הספרים הלאומי והאוניברסיטאי

Notes on "Tradition, Text, & Technology" AJL session in Cleveland 6/25/08

Prof. Carl Posy reviewed history of JNUL, and current efforts to separate national library collections from those of the Hebrew University. Effort supported by Rothschild's Yad ha-Nadiv.

Followed up by Prof. Elhanan Adler on "Creation of Full text Archive of Historical Jewish Press." JNUL announced Historic Newspapers project, 2004, issues largely digitized from microfilm copies. Biggest challenge was subject indexing, though helped by unpublished Yad Ben Zvi index. Aleph Software company has provided technical support at cost. OCR is a challenge because of similarity of certain Hebrew characters and Rashi script. Segmentation is used to identify pictures, headlines, body of text, separate articles, etc. Data to be indexed eventually in Google News.

Not quite related to JNUL, but followed by Yossi Galron on "Lexicon of Modern Hebrew Literature ", now in its fourth year of operation. Specifically focused this talk on Almagor's "Shakespeare from Right to Left", newly integrated into the Lexicon.

"The Library in the New Age" (Darnton)

Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library, has a piece in the June 12th issue of the New York Review of Books called "The Library in the New Age".

He writes: "Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?"

He reminds us, though, that, going back to the invention of writing ca. 4,000 BC, through innovations like the alphabet, the codex, movable type, and now the Internet, there's been the persistent illusion that knowledge can be captured in inert objects. The printed word, in particular, tends to exaggerate the authority of authors and publishers, and the accuracy of their knowledge claims.

Just as Wikipedia invites readers to question its own reliability, however, the new information paradigm is an opportunity "to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood," Darnton argues, "as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. "