machine AND eye readable
It is an immense attribute that physical books are so receptive to any sort of scanning, both imaging and reading. The current fad for imaging is only another enthusiasm of their use. Some presumptions do emerge, but the centuries old book will be witness centuries into the future. Imagine the presumption of the scanners who see their mission as "digitizing to preserve indefinitely".
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Digital preservation of analog content has a number of presumptions. These include (1) that digital preservation is less costly, (2) that it requires less skill, (3) that analog collections will not outlast their digital simulations, and (4) that analog collections will not need rescanning.
legibility and the immediacy of meaning
"The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?
The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner." David Brooks, "The Cognitive Age", NYT, May 2.
next wave
The University of Iowa Libraries initiative to confirm the continuing role of tangible collections in the context of digital library services....is
here. This collection development agenda has moved beyond the five year stealth collection of leaf masters into an official repository. And beyond that, in the long term, this mastering and back-up collection, curated by the Preservation department, will validate the transmission function of tangible collections.
vineyard of the text
"If we realize that the rise of the author and the transparency of print was almost accidental, at best contingent, and never, even in its own time, the only way to understand production of discourse, we can more usefully and productively create alternatives in our own time." Lisa Maruca
The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1600-1760, by Lisa Maruca, is a fabulous reading adventure. This evaluation of the historical "naturalization" of print also expertly defines the ambiguities of conveying conceptual works with physical objects.
Transitions and summersaults from the 17th to 18th and into the 21st centuries suggest that the producers of print rarely accepted equitable recognition of their different contributions. Producers of intellectual "property" and producers of delivered products of print both contend for privileged treatment. In our own contemporary context the competition continues. In spite of bias for supremacy of authors as literary producers, those creator's rights are now contradicted by "cloud" authorships, and the recognition of creativity of blog and web workers. And a dawning sense of the mortality and mutability of electronic works repositions them from eternal to physiological future life.
But what about tangibility? Here, as Maruca points out, a fawning regard for the physical possession of the computer is apparent, regardless of implications of its connectivity or content. Maruca argues that we need a grip on the tangible components of mortal work and physical product because, as print history confirms, any technology of communication quickly disappears and is sublimed as a cultural agenda.
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