[SCC_Active_Members] Nobel Purposes and TONIGHT - Of Interest to SCC - From Gutenberg to Galaxy: Accessing Cultural Assets Online

[Bill Selmeier]

Ok, let me start by first pulling Lee's chain for promoting this event 
(good idea) but then I didn't see him there.  8^)

The panel did bring some topics up that touch on a comment I briefly made 
at the last meeting.  Even though I'm a newbie at this, I'm going to try 
and postulate some thoughts.

Certanly we all would like the Museum to serve grand and noble purposes. 
To simply become a repository for software, while good, is likely to be 
repeated in numerous places more or less accurately.  It seems to me a 
noble purpose for us is to become authoritative about the identification 
or correctness of an assertion of what a particular software program, etc. 
is.

The speakers last night and particularily Henry Lowood, Stanford Curator 
for History of Science and Technology Collections, recognized that digital 
archiving is going on all over the internet.  This is a problem legacy 
collections are struggling with right now as they see their uniqueness and 
authoritativeness atrophy.  There will be multiple authoritative 
collections and many many more "vernacular" collections.

Could we as the Computer History Museum become the trusted source for the 
truthfullness of claiming e.g. "This is the cobol compiler for the Univac 
9700?"  An MD5 checksum is probably to simplistic an approach, but this is 
a noble purpose if it can be accomplished.

Henry Lowood referred to two different Stanford sponsored projects and 
implied that they also relate to vernacular collections in the same 
topical areas.

See http://www.archive.org/movies/collection.php?collection=machinima or 
http://www.machinima.com/.


Bill


On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Lee Courtney wrote:

> Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 15:51:03 -0800
> From: Lee Courtney <lcourtney at mvista.com>
> To: scc_active at computerhistory.org
> Subject: [SCC_Active_Members]  TONIGHT - Of Interest to SCC - From Gutenberg
>     to Galaxy: Accessing Cultural Assets Online
> 
> Hi all,
>
> OK, ok - thanks to everyone who put me in the doghouse - this event is
> tonight at the Museum!
>
> Sorry for the really last minute notice, but the following may be of
> particular interest to SCC members.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Lee Courtney
>
>
> CHM Presents "From Gutenberg to Galaxy: Accessing Cultural Assets Online"
>
> Moderator:
> Rick Prelinger, President, Internet Archive
>
> Panelists:
> -Czeslaw Jan Grycz, CEO, Octavo
> -Paula Jabloner, Archivist, Computer History Museum
> -Henry Lowood, Stanford Curator for History of Science and Technology
> Collections
> -Mark Mudge, CEO, Cultural Heritage Imaging
>[snipped from here]>

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