November 28 was the birthday of Liber Liber, which was “officially” born in November 1994, even if it has been active since March 1993. The association of which Marco Calvo, founding member of SGI, is president, comes of age.
Thanks to the many volunteers, who have generously donated their free time, they have published 2,495 e-books (after having subjected them to 3 revision phases), 6,320 pieces of music, dozens of audio books and have recently started publishing videos as well. Below are Liber Liber's projects.
This is 100.29 gigabytes of data (more than 100 billion "characters", 100.210.252.692 bytes to be exact), split into 50,797 files.
What do we want to do in the future? We continue to wait confidently that sooner or later a digital conservation project of our cultural heritage will start. A publicly supported project.
Our volunteers have given the world the digital version of the Divine Comedy, and 2,494 other works. We have created very strict protocols, which allow us to offer e-books with an average percentage of typos that is even lower than books on the market. But there is still a great deal to be done, and a national, or better still, a European project would be ideal.
What is politics waiting for to understand that the Internet has changed some things, but above all it has made many others possible? A piece of music, a video, an e-book in the public domain can be duplicated indefinitely and distributed in seconds. The costs are very low and the social utility enormous, priceless.
It's a feasible idea, and if a small non-profit organization like Liber Liber can do it, why can't public institutions? For the record, it must be said that some public projects have been born, some of which are very valid.
But with funds so scarce that they lasted a few years, if not a few months. So some time ago, since we have been "resisting" for some time, we decided to participate directly in some calls for tenders. We wanted, and we want, to improve the tools that we make available to our volunteers and our users, and thus increase the rate of
publication. But national and European calls for tenders are completely inaccessible. For many different reasons, some of which it would be desirable for the judiciary to investigate. But above all for an insurmountable bureaucratic wall, it is not clear what was erected in defense of what. Frankly, it doesn't seem like the best use of the money
public.
Italy and the European Union, since Liber Liber was born, in the last 18 years, have spent a small, very small part of public resources in favor of culture. But still billions of euros. Well, do you know where they are?
If today I find interesting cultural resources online, from Wikipedia to Linux, it is thanks to the voluntary work of many people and cultural associations. However, they have not received 1 euro of these billions.
Something doesn't add up. So why don't we change the rules a bit? For example, let's eliminate some artificial bureaucratic obstacles, those artfully designed to keep out those who are not "in the right circle", and introduce the concept of effectiveness. To obtain public funding, the project must be visible and effective. Posted a
announcement (today it is difficult to get it published on some remote site), as well as announcing the winner, after one year, three years, five years... the impact of the funded project must also be announced. If the impact is little or no, who promoted it
must be penalized in subsequent tenders. In this way, perhaps we will have a few more useful projects, and a few less money-eating "cliques".
Soon you will see a new logo, very simple and minimal. On the one hand, the era of CDROMs is over, data is less and less tied to a specific device; on the other the forms of reading have changed. And we also wanted to represent these changes symbolically… So stay tuned!
Next, we're migrating the site to a new CMS, a tool that will allow many more editors to work in parallel. You can see a preview by visiting our shop
<http://www.liberliber.it/
The new site will be easier and more pleasant to navigate, it will contain more information and new sections. It will take some time to migrate the 50,797 files from the old site (yes, that's a lot), but one step at a time…
In the meantime: happy birthday Liber Liber! But above all thanks to its volunteers, who day by day make the ideal of culture accessible to all concrete.
