Searchable Notes

Internet Archive to store researchers' notes, "raw" data - John Timmer @ Ars Technica

Oh good Lord, what an amazing idea. I'm surprised no one has done this already. A project like this could revolutionize the study of past scholars and the turns they took through their research. Imagine having all of Nietzsches' notes on hand and searchable, or Darwins' or even someone like Neil Gaiman. All the bad ideas run to the ground, the ideas passed by, the leaps in thinking, everything that a writer or scholar worked on but never published, right there for you to read. You could go back and take a look at the math of a respected physicist and see if he might have made a mistake, or find a solution to a problem not yet solved. More than just putting books up for online searching, you have the raw material that was pulled together for those books. This is the kind of thing that web 2.0 was made for.