Thanks to mphillie for bringing out my thesis so to speak, and I’m thinking hard about how to present it in the clearest way. I don’t want to emphasize “backwardness” in the story of these women doctors, my purpose is to champion them, not apologize. Yes, I intend to focus on Utah, Idaho and Arizona, but that is without researching the West coastal states, which I think have a different story. Will be commenting more on this later.
Meanwhile, here’s what I have to say on copyrights as applying to my project and the scan comparison:
For 10/27 Copyright cost analysis
As others have mentioned, I’m quite happy to not be dealing with a tangle of copyright issues applying to my project.
Factors: This website will contain documents pertaining to the mid to late 19th Century. These documents consist of family papers, archival paper in the public domain and published books, all of which never were or are no longer governed by copyright law. There will be no secondary sources quoted, and opinions, comments, etc. will go to a discussion page.
With that said, the challenge is to present a concept enabling me to post the documents I choose, encourage those with valuable information or documents to post or upload while keeping a close eye on this material. Sharing information is a high priority.
Book scan comparison:
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen
Google Books – I have the impression of function beginning with the LOC number as the first screen. There are also information tabs “About this book” and “Read this book” which are more welcoming than a plain and symmetrical layout. The ‘Digitized by Google’ on every single page is annoying. Considering this book is in the public domain I can’t see the reason, beyond commercial ego, to stamping each page instead of just at the beginning, which seems more reasonable. The scanned image preserved as much as is electronically possible the picture of a book published in 1902 and a bit worn.
For a non techie like myself, the book was easy to find and specific information on the book was just a tab away. There didn’t appear to be a mountain of choices for formats to download or just view. This site is geared toward less computer savvy and more literary audience.
Open Content Alliance – So far it’s complicated just getting to the book. Now I’ve got to make the choice of format and all of them take time to download. After going through all the formats I find ‘flip book’ to be exactly what I’m looking for. For the person needing various formats to suit specific purposes, this site has more to offer than Google Book. This site targets those may have more in mind for the text than just reading it.
Like Google Books, it imitates the turning of pages. I have the impression conscientious preservation of the book feel with both this sites.
Comments on reading:
Focusing on the article, I think this is a brilliant discussion on the dangers facing the professional world of history, but it comes no closer than many a discussion in the past 20 years to pinpointing how to deal in an effective way. The example of “Bert” highlighted an excellent point on the value of what we keep. While not exactly addressing the point made, this thought occured to me, it’s entirely possible in this unstable electronic world that a whole lot of fluff or satire could be kept while documents relating to the fundamental movement of countries could become nonexistant.
