January 12, 2005
California Digital Library Books
A post on ifMUD alerted me to the slim but intriguing public book selection that the California Digital Library has made freely available for online reading. Personally, my interest in this history-heavy, literature-heavy selection was piqued by The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley and by Christopher Beach’s book ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition. I was about ready to start reading one of these, in fact…
Unfortunately, my attempts to fetch a whole book using the GNU utility wget met with some difficulties. (If I’m going to read a book, I don’t want to have to keep my browser window open all the time or restrict myself to reading in areas with wireless connectivity. Hell, I’ve even whacked the whole Unknown site; I’m certainly going to want to have a copy of a book that I’m reading on disk.) After struggling to figure out how I could command this utility to retrieve a book for me for offline perusal, I found that there’s a robots.txt file prohibiting the automated fetching of those pages. You can order wget to ignore the robots.txt file, but the whole reason I’m attracted to these books in the first place is that they’re made freely available for me to read – I’m not looking to get some “warez” copies of these books in violation of UC Digital Library policy, just have a copy for my personal use that I can read. I could, I suppose, go through and manually download all the sections of those two books. But my enthusiasm has been deflated. I understand that university presses are timid about making access to their books really easy, but – not meaning to bite the eHand that feeds me or look a gift library in the stacks – I do hope that projects like this will follow the lead of PENNSound and make their public online materials easily downloadable.
January 13th, 2005 at 1:39 am
The link to “The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley” above is wrong. I poked around buy I couldn’t find the right one.
January 13th, 2005 at 10:33 am
Thanks, Malcom, I fixed that.
January 13th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
Please, nick, it’s Malcolm. With two ‘l’s.
January 13th, 2005 at 6:07 pm
Sigh, you fix one thing on your bog, and you screw up something else.
January 16th, 2005 at 10:27 pm
Bog?
January 16th, 2005 at 10:35 pm
I’m going to have to start handing out “Got Nick’s Joke” awards to you, Andrew. Or else stop being so cryptically subtle in my attempts at humor.
January 16th, 2005 at 11:48 pm
Sorry Nick, I have a compulsion to link at inappropriate times. It’s an addiction. Hyperphilia. I’m working on it. “Think before you link”