[Tig] Library of Congress facility in Virginia

[Bob Friesenhahn]

>
> Bob, if I'm not mistaken, in the case of the UCLA archives (which 
> are the second-largest after the Library of Congress') there were or 
> are various licensing arrangements possible, fees going directly 
> into funding preservation, archiving and restoration. UCLA is under 
> state (regional) control, whereas the LoC is under national 
> government control, but I'd be surprised if there weren't similar 
> licensing protocols.

I don't see any purpose for licensing copyright-free content which has 
been captured into digital form by Library of Congress.  Of course the 
Library of Congress may also capture considerable content which is not 
yet copyright-free.  Eventually copyrights will expire and the content 
will become copyright-free.  It is a long term effort.

> Having the archives on the net (for a fee) would be awesome, and a 
> Herculean task, and might better be achieved with Internet2 ( 
> http://www.internet2.edu/ ) and some kind of limited gatewaying into 
> Internet1.

This is short-term thinking.  The "Internet" has incredible backbone 
bandwith.  The limitations are at the user connection point.  It seems 
reasonable to plan to make copyright-free content in government care 
available via the "Internet".  It seems reasonable for the goverment 
to charge a fee related to the actual cost of providing service, which 
includes a cost per gigabyte transferred.  In fact, the fee could help 
pay for restoration efforts and for storage of media on readily 
accessible disk storage rather than on archive tape.

Thus far I have only seen a couple of Library of Congress films 
available via the Internet and these were through cooperation with the 
CinePaint (Film GIMP) project.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/