after a brief respite in which lots of exciting things happened. I will mention but one: I got a letter in the New York Times on Thursday....I suppose I should have a link to it.
The issue is about Google's initative to digitize a bunch of University libraries. In the letter, I raise a note of caution. I am concerned about the devaluation of printed matter, a denial of the real value of going to examine texts and talking with people -- librarians, scholars, others. Reading a work in front of a computer screen is one thing, and can in fact be very helpful, so I don't think the project is a bad one. But it should not, should never, be a question of either/or -- either the digital text or the printed text. Both are important in different ways.
Here are some other thoughts I posted on Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog:
Digitizing library collections, especially those of major national libraries and excellent research libraries is extraordinarily helpful for getting the ball rolling. However, it is important not to go utopian on the wonderss of digital technology. Here are three points:
1. Research value. There is a big difference between looking at an actual book (complete with oddities, squaring it with different editions, etc) and looking at it in digital form. Examining it in person, talking with librarians about collections, talking with others who have different sorts of expertise in book history (ie watermarks on paper) can shed light in all sorts of strange ways. This is especially true with manuscript material, but also true about books...books in libraries usually had original owners who made notes, had other collections, etc. You get none of this context with the digital version, as it is being conceived.
2. Technology issues. As was noted above, books are durable technologies. It is not clear how durable the storage and interface devices of the proposed databases will be. Can banks access computer records of two decades ago? How much does it cost them to reformat their stored data to new technologies? How many of us have what it takes to read the 5.25" floppies of a decade ago? What about the 3.25" disks?
3. Economic issues. a. Libraries, especially at Universities, are being pressured to go electronic. So we are under pressure to cut our subscriptions to paper journals in favour of their digital versions. Same thing with newspapers. All this is meant to help with the storage crunch. But imagine what a library would be like if it only shelved current books? What about if it had no books to browse? Would you be able to browse in the same way digitally? Never mind flirting with people in stacks.
b. Google, right now, is a socially conscious company. But it is publicly owned and traded. What price will it charge for access to these books? What about in the future? Will we need to succumb to advertising to consult works? What happens when the current owners get bored, or someone else takes over? Do we really want the historical cultural record to be privatized in this way? What are the constraints on Google's creation of the database?
Most people posting only use libraries in a casual way, or targeting in the way lawyers look up cases, or a blogger looks up on line articles. For these sorts of research, on line availability simplifies things tremendously. For others of us what we would be able to do, and to teach others to do, would not only change, but also be in many way completely different from what we do now. And we already experience the pressures in that direction. Its not Luddism, it is realism. And it is important to draw distinctions.
Nicholson Baker has an excellent book about the digitization of newspapers, Double Fold.
As for the weather: yesterday was a glorious day...balmy almost, with great suna nd blue skies. Today is distinctly grayer, but not a heavy gray...a light one, that seems to promise to break open at any moment...though it probably won't. And chillier, no doubt as well.
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