http://www.andycarvin.com/ permalink: http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2005/03/chirac_declares.html
Here's a snippet:
...While too much of the Internet is English-only and society needs to make much greater investments in ensuring other languages and other cultures can prosper online, this doesn't mean that you should go after libraries just because they want to put their collections online.
There is no such thing as scarcity when it comes to how much information you can put online. It's not like there are only 100 terabytes of available space on the Internet that will eventually run out, preventing others from publishing content. This isn't Deadwood, the Yukon or the Comstock, folks; the gold in them thair hills ain't runnin' out. As long as companies keep building bigger and cheaper hard drives, there will always be more room for more content to be posted online.
So President Chirac, please go ahead and encourage Francophone libraries to put their collections online. But don't stop there. Encourage individuals and their communities to become content creators and citizen journalists as well. Encourage French universities to adopt open courseware initiatives, and fund French projects to create community media portals like the new Ourmedia project. Bankroll Francophone nations in Africa to make sure their enormous wealth of cultural content can go online, as can their people, with the skills to become content creators in their own right. Please, go ahead and do all of those things. But don't frame this as a cultural war or counter-offensive against "Anglo-Saxon" Internet culture; giving all cultures the opportunity to share their knowledge, wisdom, literature and history via the Internet will benefit everyone, whether they speak English, French, Arabic, Vietnamese or Wolof....
ac
David P. Dillard wrote:
Thanks to Andy Carvin for posting on this very important and very digital divide and in this case language divide related development. Net-Gold has a post with links to several news stories on this subject that may be of interest to members of this discussion group.
From: "David P. Dillard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 9:43 pm Subject: ELECTRONIC TEXT: RESOURCES : LIBRARIES: ELECTRONIC: DIGITIZATION PROJECTS : VIRTUAL LIBRARIES: French Classics Enter Cyberspace : France Fights Back Against 'Googlisation' <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/message/5205>
What is really interesting about this is that this development following on the heels of the Google creation of their project as five libraries to put fifteen million books online full text is coming at the same time that there is discussion within the newspaper industry of charging for news content online and the Yahoo sports coverage already includes fee based article links.
From: "David P. Dillard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue Mar 15, 2005 7:02 am Subject: NEWS : NEWSPAPERS : INTERNET: ACCESS: FREE : FREE VS. FEE: Can Papers End the Free Ride Online? <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/message/5122>
If this happens and becomes widespread that newspapers become fee based, look for a very rapid coming of age of weblogs as they move in to replace newspapers as a free source of news and information about current events. The Wikipedia already does extensive current events or news coverage. To say the weblogs are liked by the membership and leaders of the Digital Divide Network is sort of like saying that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans tend to be wet. <g> It may be an important potential role of the digital divide communities, not just this one, to lobby and counsel the media to retain free content and even assist them in finding through advertising and marketing electronic commerce ventures, the facility to viably continue free web based content, as a key part of reducing and ending the digital divide is access to quality and currently needed content and information.
Providing free access to libraries would be of little good to anyone if the books and magazines in the libraries had first been carefully removed and only an empty building remained in its place. Although with the Google and Chrirac book initiatives and other already in place full text book and periodical full text free online resources, the library is hardly empty, thank goodness, but there is still a vital need for the citizens of the world to have up to date knowledge of what is happening in the world and of these many simply cannot afford to pay for this knowledge.
Sincerely, David Dillard Temple University (215) 204 - 4584 [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/net-gold> <http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ringleaders/davidd.html> <http://www.kovacs.com/medref-l/medref-l.html> <http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html> <http://www.LIFEofFlorida.org> World Business Community Advisor <http://www.WorldBusinessCommunity.org>
==================================================
On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Andy Carvin wrote:
From CIO-Today.com... -ac
Chirac Plans French 'Counter-Offensive' on Internet Culture
French President Jacques Chirac has vowed to launch a new "counter-offensive" against American cultural domination, enlisting the support of the British, German and Spanish governments in a multimillion euro bid to put the whole of European literature online. The president was reacting last week to news that the American search-engine provider
Google is to offer access to some 15 million books and documents currently housed in five of the most prestigious libraries in the English-speaking world.
The realization that the "Anglo-Saxons" were on the verge of a major breakthrough toward the dream of a universal library seriously rattled the cultural establishment in Paris, raising again the fear that French language and ideas will one day be reduced to a quaint regional peculiarity. So on Wednesday Chirac met with Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and National Library president Jean-Noel Jeanneney and asked them "to analyze the conditions under which the collections of the great libraries in France and Europe could be put more widely and more rapidly on the Internet."
<http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_title= Chirac-Plans-French--Counter-Offensive--on-Internet-Culture&story_id=31513>
or
http://tinyurl.com/4c9ew
-----------------------------------
Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com
-----------------------------------
_______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
-- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
