RE: diglib: question

["Normandy Helmer" <nhelmer@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

It is a very interesting point! Extremely fat books are hard for every one
to access, whether they are fat in pages or fat in bytes. Visual skimming is
easy from a printed book but it gets harder when multiple files are
involved, since they have to be loaded in full before you can skim, visually
or aurally. I suppose an index or abstracted information would be a useful
tool in such cases but we don't have tools readily available to do that, do
we? (I've found the automated abstracting engines are unimpressive.)

Does the legal responsibility to make materials accessible extend to
individual works in the collection? Do we have to optimize accessibility or
simply enable? (big cost differentials implicit there) Does every work
produced by the Library have to be "fully" accessible? I think having James
B would be a good idea; we have a chance to develop an access policy now
that could be implemented day forward much more cheaply than it could be
retrofitted.

nsh