Here are some headlines marking various milestones of progress and regress in the Government 2.0 agenda.
As we recommended in the Cutler Report donations to the global commons are growing apace.
Meanwhile it’s not surprising that the Scandinavians, who are some of the most impressive governors in the world – along with us and the Canadians – are moving towards their government becoming a purchasing aggregator of digital content for their citizens. Here’s the news on Norway.
The National Library of Norway is digitizing all the books in its collection, processing the text to make it searchable, and making them available to read online.
It’s similar to the mass digitization efforts in the UK and Finland, but Norway has taken the extra step of making agreements with many publishers to allow anyone with a Norway IP address to access copyrighted material.
The library owns equipment for scanning and text structure analysis of the books. It’s also adding metadata and storing the files in a database for easy retrieval.
Librarians estimate the digitization of the entire collection, which includes materials dating back to the Middle Ages, will take 20 to 30 years. The effort started in 2006.
Meanwhile our government does something like the converse, helping the firms of the world charge our citizens higher prices than those of other countries.
