Tag: libraries

botanyshitposts:

botanyshitposts:

when u go to the Very Small Shelf in the library that has info on ur Very Specific Niche Research Topic Of The Day and u go to pick out a book and they stick together bc they’ve been pressed into other books without moving for so long and some of the books are typed in weird typewriter font with huge spacing instead of regular shit and they have old analog library cards that were only punched one (1) time in 1983 like thats when u kno ur In Deep and u gotta like prepare urself….. u could find anything in that shit once u pass like the first bookshelf like its completely free game anything could happen bc u KNO that shit hasn’t been even glanced at in 200 years….open up the 1904 volume of Modern Dick Aerodynamics to the 4832954th page u gonna find a letter in morse code like “i leavith with mine cow for the countryside at dawn”

#i only ever found a couple old receipts but one feels a great love anyway#i was advised in high school to think of research as a way of joining an old and continuous discussion among peers#this was excellent advice tbh#it is comforting to think of oneself in community however vague with the venerable bede#because of course all my research was about medieval numismatics and wages & prices and all that#so you have to think about the medieval historians and their libraries; tiny and extensive at once#love to the ghosts who taught me everything i know via @girderednerve

i know u were prob talking about said specific medieval historians but in the context of science and academia as a whole ‘love to the ghosts who taught me everything i know’ is one of the most emotionally charged things ive ever heard and it resonates so fiercely with the old untouched environments of university libraries suddenly disturbed by young curious souls that i described in the original post tbh thank you i want to get it tattooed on my body 

hashtag-med-school:

kaeebonrai:

nunyabizni:

intergalactic-dorks:

intergalactic-dorks:

Everytime you fill in CAPTCHA you’re helping to digitalize old books and documents. Using CAPTCHA abt 250 books are added to a digital database everyday

Its called RECAPTCHA! The creator of CAPTCHA (Luis von Ahn) realised a lot of time was being wasted with CAPTCHA (worldwide we spend about 500,000 hours doing CAPTCHA every day)

So he wanted to put it to good use

The reason why CAPTCHA uses wonky letters is because computers can’t read them, but we can!

But when trying to automatically digitalise old books and documents this becomes a hindrance because computers often cant read the faded old letters. So the digitalising is done by humans (very costly and time consuming)

Anyway Ahn found out about these a integraded into captcha creating RECAPTCHA.

Everyday about 150 (sorry i meant 150 not 250) old books get digitalized this way. They are currently using it to digitalize the whole archive of The New York Times (since 1851)

So we’re all kinda building a digital library of alexandria this way by using captcha, noice

https://techcrunch.com/2007/09/16/recaptcha-using-captchas-to-digitize-books/

reCAPTCHA Founded 2007. Overview reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service
that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that
cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for
humans to decipher.

In case any of you thought this was BS

I always love seeing reCAPTCHA being used.

That’s what my dad told me too.

So when we fill out those wonky letters, we are basically helping the computer read weird handwriting.