Hello Everyone,
I've been asked to forward the following message to the listserve.
Please respond directly to Ron.
Thanks,
Bob S.
>From: [log in to unmask]
>Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 10:40:47 EDT
>Subject: sharing of scientific lectures for generations
>To: [log in to unmask]
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>dear Dr. Schmidt,
>
>i am not exactly sure who to submit this to.
>
>I was wondering if you could post this to your list serve with an
>indication to comment directly to me so that the responses do not
>clutter up your list. Thanks so much...
>
>Dear Archivist Friends,
>
>I am a Director of a World Health Organization collaborating center
>and Professor of epidemiology in Pittsburgh. I very much would like
>your perspective on the work we are developing.
>
>I am not an archivist, therefore i would like some direction
>concerning the long term preservation of the lectures of science
>world wide. I come about this from a very different direction than
>you, I think.
>
>I am developing and discussing this work with Ismail Serageldin, the
>director of the Library of Alexandria, Vint Cerf, Gil Omenn, the
>head of the AAAS, and Elias Zerhouni, the head of the NIH. The goal
>is to save scientific lectures for at least the same duration of
>the Library of Alexandria, 700 years. We are developing this with
>the library of alexandria in egypt.
>
>Let me give you a little background. About 7 years ago a group of us
>wanted to improve research and training in the area of epidemiology
>and prevention. World health is hampered by a lack of educational
>materials in prevention. We hit upon a simple idea, you are an
>expert on preservation, and i am an expert in the area of diabetes
>epidemiology. If we shared our lectures i could reasonably teach
>about archiving and you could teach about epidemiology. This is
>especially important where many countries in africa have not had
>access to journals for 15 years. We first built a global network,
>which now has 38,000 faculty members. Then we collected lectures and
>we now have 2622, the largest collection of PowerPoint lectures on
>prevention. This has been enormously successful with over 100
>million hits a year.
>(<http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/>www.pitt.edu/~super1/). Most of the
>lectures are annotated where the lecturer accompanies the slide with
>what he/she would say about that slide, thus empowering even better
>those who want to use it. We have been able to do this because of
>the Internet and PowerPoint becoming ubiquitous world wide the
>tradition of knowledge sharing and education in science..
>
>Our goal is not for me to teach students in Somalia, but rather that
>I can empower the teachers of Somilia now and for future generations
>by providing them my educational lectures in formats they can
>readily use in the classroom. This empowers teachers, rather than
>replaces them.
>
>We have moved in several directions. One of these was to collect
>lectures from the top people in science, the Nobel prize winners and
>the National Academy of Science winners. By the end of the summer
>we will have 50 Nobel prize winners, and 300 NAS. In doing this a
>person from Cornell came to me, and asked.."Ron would you like this
>tape from 1932 of Max Born and Sir Lord Rutherford?" It is the only
>known voice recording of these two nobel prize winners who describe
>the atomic structure. It was fantastic. Then I begin to think how
>powerful it would have been to have the lectures of Newton, or
>Einstein as our knowedge is what we leave for future
>generations.. The problem has been that since 1801 we have taught
>using a blackboard, where at the end of class, we erased the board,
>destroying the lecture. Now with PowerPoint the lectures can be
>stored and with the Internet we can provide these materials
>virtually anywhered. In academia powerpoint lectures are rapidly
>migrating to the web, in 5 years the number jumped from 1 to 6
>million. Obviously many of us are not in agreement with Microsoft,
>but for now it is the standard for sharing much of scientific knowledge.
>
>
>Then I was stumped...how can we preserve the lectures for 700 years,
>this is what i ask you. I was thinking that we should maximize
>redundancy by using different formats, e.g. video, sound,
>powerpoint, paper...etc...and to maximize the redundancy in terms of
>location, e.g. putting these into the 170 National Libraries so that
>if the Library of Congress does not exist in 700 years, the library
>of Malaysia may. Our initial concept is to maximize the likelihood
>that at least 1 copy would survive. We need to consider how to save
>this information not only in the US, but in China, Malaysia, Mali,
>etc, who have very little resources.
>
>Peter Lasewich from IBM suggested a system also of multiple
>formats, one of which was very inexpensive, e.g. moving the
>PowerPoint lectures to microfilm. We have been storing some of the
>lectures in what we call comic book format where they are printed
>out with 9 sides per page.
>We think that we have to preserve the lectures of science as this is
>what we share with future generations, for future centuries. The
>approaches need to run from almost an oral history approach to
>digital preservation so that all people can benefit.
>
>You are the experts, and we need your thoughts. Please pass this
>around to people who you think can help. We would like as much input
>as possible, and we would like to collaborate with you to establish
>a global archive of the lectures of science where people in the year
>2515 in China, Pittsburgh, Novosbrisk and Mali can share.
>
>
>Thanks so much for your thoughts.
>
>ron
>
>
>Supercourse member <http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/>www.pitt.edu/~super1/
>
>Ronald E. LaPorte, Ph.D.
>Director Disease Monitoring and Telecommunications
>WHO Collaborating Centre
>Professor of Epidemiology
>Graduate School of Public Health
>3512 Fifth Ave, Room 310
>DLR building
>University of Pittsburgh
>Pittsburgh, PA 15213
>USA
>
>Phone: 412 383 2746
>Fax: 412 383 1026
>
>Email: [log in to unmask]
>Email with large attachments: [log in to unmask]
Bob Schmidt
Archives Listserve Coordinator
Miami University Archives
Oxford, Ohio 45056
Tel: 513-529-6720
Email: [log in to unmask]
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