e-miles to go and promises to keep
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [Stony Brook University]On: 29 October 2014, At: 16:44Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Collection ManagementPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wcol20
e-Miles to Go and Promises toKeepWalter Cybulski aa Quality Assurance Unit, Preservation andCollection Management Section , U.S. NationalLibrary of Medicine in Bethesda , 8600 RockvillePike, Bethesda, MD, 20894, USAPublished online: 22 Sep 2008.
To cite this article: Walter Cybulski (2007) e-Miles to Go and Promises to Keep,Collection Management, 31:1-2, 57-73, DOI: 10.1300/J105v31n01_04
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J105v31n01_04
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
e-Miles to Go and Promises to KeepWalter Cybulski
SUMMARY. Though libraries are by no means abandoning print col-lections, librarians continue to experience the effects of a divided realityas access for text and image materials shifts from print to digital. It is notinformation as much as the uniqueness of information in book form thatneeds to be promoted. Librarians, aware of their obligation to provide re-sponsible custody for legacy collections, have an opportunity to restorethis experience to the information landscape as they reconfigure theirinstitutions to capitalize on the access benefits of new technologies.doi:10.1300/J105v31n01_04 [Article copies available for a fee from TheHaworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>© 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Print retention, print persistence, collection development
INTRODUCTION
“Its not the ‘death of the book’–it’s the death of the library.”
–John Hartley1
Walter Cybulski is Head of the Quality Assurance Unit, Preservation and Collec-tion Management Section, U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, 8600Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894 (E-mail: [email protected]). Mr.Cybulski’s concern for the fate of print collections arises from a lifelong interest inpoetry and fiction. He authored “Print Collections and Their Possible Futures” in WhoWants Yesterday’s Papers?: Essays on the Research Value of Printed Materials in theDigital Age (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005).
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “e-Miles to Go and Promises to Keep.” Cybulski, Walter.Co-published simultaneously in Collection Management (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 31, No. 1/2, 2006,pp. 57-73; and: The Changing Book: Transitions in Design, Production, and Preservation (ed: Nancy E.Kraft, and Holly Martin Huffman) The Haworth Press, Inc., 2006, pp. 57-73. Single or multiple copies ofthis article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH,9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].
Available online at http://col.haworthpress.com© 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1300/J105v31n01_04 57
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
In J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, the title character–a dis-tinguished novelist at the end of a successful literary career–reflects onthe publication of her first book:
I remember clearly the day the package arrived in the mail,an advance copy for the author. I was naturally thrilled to have it inmy hands, printed and bound, the real thing [my italics], undeni-able. But something was nagging at me. I got on the telephone tomy publishers. “Have the deposit copies gone out?” I asked. And Iwould not rest until I had their assurance that the deposit copieswould be mailed the same afternoon, to Scotland and the Bodleianand so forth, but above all to the British Museum. That was mygreat ambition: to have my place on the shelves of the British Mu-seum, rubbing shoulders with the other Cs, the great ones: Carlyleand Chaucer and Coleridge and Conrad. (The joke is that my near-est literary neighbor turned out to be Marie Corelli.)2
The character considers the printed book to be “the real thing.” Likemany authors (and readers) in the modern era, she expresses a belief thatpublication constitutes a rite of passage from manuscript notes andrough drafts to a more durable, finished form. The ritual of publicationand delivery of a copy of one’s first book to a “depository” library se-cures for the author a claim on permanence.3 Looking back at that mo-ment nearly fifty years later, Elizabeth continues:
One smiles now at such ingenuousness. Yet behind my anx-ious query there was something serious, and behind that serious-ness in turn something pathetic that is less easy to acknowledge.
Let me explain. Ignoring all the copies of the book you havewritten that are going to perish–that are going to be pulped becausethere is no buyer for them, that are going to be opened and read fora page or two and then yawned at and put aside for ever, that aregoing to be left behind at seaside hotels or in trains–ignoring allthese lost ones, we must be able to feel there is at least one copythat will not only be read but taken care of, given a home, given aplace on the shelves that will be its own perpetuity.4
Elizabeth speaks not only as an author reflecting on the lifespan of aprinted work, but also as a human being reflecting on her own mortality.She adds her name (as Coetzee vicariously adds his through the personaof “Elizabeth Costello”) to the long list of authors who have considered
58 The Changing Book: Transitions In Design, Production, And Preservation
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
the printed word to be a claim placed upon immortality. As IanDonaldson has written:
In a literate society, one of the great incentives to writing isthe thought that such work will survive . . . not simply in the mindsof others, but as a tangible object, a manuscript, a book. “I shall notwholly die,” writes Horace, “some part of me/Will cheat the goddessof death.”5
Authors continue to echo this thought. Nobel Prize winning poetCzeslaw Milosz, who once worked as a librarian, invokes Horace, theEncyclopedists, and perhaps Callimachus, (believed to be the first toarrange volumes in alphabetical order 6) when he writes:
Oh yes, not all of me shall die, there will remainAn item in the fourteenth volume of an encyclopediaNext to a hundred Millers and Mickey Mouse.7
Donaldson mentions other authors who associate publication with im-mortality, but “realize in one part of their minds how perishable thosebooks in fact are.”8 Coetzee, speaking through Elizabeth’s voice, exploresthe darker side of what it means for a published work to be perishable:
But of course the British Museum, or (now) the British Li-brary is not going to last forever. It too will crumble and decay, andthe books on its shelves turn to powder. And anyhow, long beforethat day, as the acid gnaws away at the paper, as the demand forspace grows, the ugly and unread and unwanted will be carted offto some facility or other and tossed into a furnace, and all trace ofthem will be liquidated from the master catalogue. After which itwill be as if they had never existed.9
Elizabeth has reached a conclusion that subverts her youthful enthu-siasm. Her initial exuberance at being published and having a placesecured for her book in a national collection has crumbled away anddecayed. She presents her audience with an apocalyptic vision:
That is an alternative vision of the Library of Babel,10 moredisturbing to me than the vision of Jorge Luis Borges. . . . a libraryfrom which books that were really conceived, written and pub-lished are absent, absent even from the memory of the librarians. . . .
Walter Cybulski 59
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
We can rely no more on the British Library or the Library of Con-gress no more than on reputation itself to save us from oblivion. Ofthat I must remind myself, and remind you, too.11
This could be any of the voices speaking to us from the collectivesilence of the hundreds of thousands of printed works currently liningthe shelves of libraries, or whispering from a storage container in one ofthe cool, dimly lit offsite facilities designed to protect and preserve theprinted word.
To anyone concerned with the enduring value of printed works,Elizabeth’s compression of millennia into a verbal geologic layer a fewsentences thick serves as a reminder of the vanity of having any preten-sions about being “immortal.” The record of civilizations come andgone testifies to the possibility that what she says will one day come topass. She dispenses with preservation issues entirely and heads straightfor the end time, presenting her audience with a crisply worded escha-tology informed by the chemistry of paper deterioration (“acid gnawsaway” at paper), library science (the growing demand for storage space),and a literary anxiety that many works of fiction (especially those con-sidered “ugly and unread and unwanted”) will not only lack a readershipin the future, but will be “liquidated from the master catalogue.”
It is unlikely that librarians would be shocked by a meditation on thevulnerability of paper artifacts, since to them it is not news. However, ashistory unfortunately reminds us, the image of books being “carted offto some facility or other” and “tossed into a furnace” is not news either.The disturbing part of the story comes when Elizabeth says that it islibrarians who will be doing the book burning.
In the not too distant past, one would have been quick to argue thatthis goes against the grain of what custodians of collections have beentrying to do for generations. One might have written a letter to the NewYorker in defense of librarians who have dedicated their professionallives to preserving printed works and providing future generations withaccess to the record of the past. If not access to the “real thing,” then atthe very least to a high quality analog print copy, or an analog surrogate(such as microfilm) that requires nothing more than a lens and a lightsource to read.
Instead, amid ongoing discussions of the death of the book, the declin-ing use of books in academic libraries12 and the wholesale digitization ofprint collections, we find ourselves wondering if print collections reallydo have a future. We might even start questioning whether or not librar-ies still merit the public’s trust as places where books will endure for
60 The Changing Book: Transitions In Design, Production, And Preservation
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
generations to come. Is it now the case that each generation will decidefor itself what to do with its “legacy” print collections? It would appearthat there is more truth than irony in the comment made by SvenBirkerts, that “if it can’t be rendered digitally, it can’t be much good,”13
Such statements are enough to make “Gutenberg elegists” of us all.
THE FUTURE IS . . . WHERE YOU HAPPENTO BE LOOKING AT THE TIME?
There is a lot of discussion these days about what books are, whattexts are, how reading texts in book form differs from reading texts onglowing screens, and how the digital age makes it possible for scholarsand researchers to access research materials with a few keystrokes.Visionaries conjure images of wireless, hand-held futures and digitallibraries where once “hand-held” referred primarily to instructions forthe proper care and handling of printed works. Geoffrey Nunberg haswritten:
The problem in talking about the future of the library is thatit isn’t always clear what people have in mind by the term. Tomany, the phrase ‘digital library’ conjures up the picture of an as-cension of the current library into disembodied electronic form.No one goes so far as to predict the end of the traditional library; atleast people reserve for it a role as an archive where we can pre-serve ‘legacy collections’ of paper books and documents . . . but asan institution, the library is “conspicuously absent from most ofthe scenarios that visionaries paint.”14
Whether included in imagined futures or not, librarians bring a longtradition of sophisticated knowledge organization and management tothe table. Libraries have never been mere warehouses for the storage ofcollections. A library, whether made of bricks and mortar or ones andzeroes, is more than a parking place for books, a storehouse of images of“neat stuff” on a website, or a handy tool shed with links to everythingunder the sun. Libraries are the living evidence of the highly skilledwork of librarians, whose expertise includes not only the organizationof texts, but also the organization of contexts. The library is a placewhere the context that makes the understanding of information possibleis discoverable. It is the work of librarians that make this discovery pos-sible without aimless wandering among linear miles of bookshelves or
Walter Cybulski 61
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
baffled staring at a computer monitor, unsure if the results on the firstfifty screens (or the first hundred of six million search results) have any-thing to do with what the searcher is looking for.
If libraries appear to be absent from envisioned futures, the reasonmay be that they are already undergoing transformations to accommo-date the needs of today’s scholars and demonstrate their continued rele-vance as repositories of research materials in a wide variety of formats.Preservation librarians, for example, are being called upon to assist withthe development of strategies to preserve content that exists only indigital form, as well as content that has been reformatted using digitaltechnologies. Their skills in exploring, interpreting and managing theinterface where print and digital content intersect are proving to beincreasingly valuable over time.
FROM DIGITAL LIBRARIES TO“UBIQUITOUS KNOWLEDGE ENVIRONMENTS”
To perennial advocates of books, reading and learning, it seems fairlyobvious that librarians would be the first to treasure, protect and securea safe haven for books in the digital age. Is this the case? We have allheard that the library of the future is a digital library. We may have alsobeen informed that the digital library is an accomplished fact, leaving nofurther room for discussion. Yet there are some who view the concept ofa digital library as a transitional phenomenon, rather than a long-termcollection access solution. A background paper for a 2003 NationalScience Foundation (NSF)/Joint Information System Committee (JISC)workshop states:
What began as an effort to create ‘digital libraries’ has trans-formed into something much more dynamic than was originallyenvisioned. . . . Much of the potential for new digital content is onlybeginning to be understood. . . . Traditional characterizations feelpassive in light of what is emerging, and traditional infrastructuressuch as scholarly journals and research libraries fall short of deliv-ering on this potential. The terms ‘repository’ and ‘library’ captureonly a small portion of what is emerging. . . . The real challenge isto build systems supporting scholarly communication that yieldnew capabilities and capacities so effectively and efficiently thatthey are intuitive and transparent in their operation.15
62 The Changing Book: Transitions In Design, Production, And Preservation
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
Neal Kaske, Manager of the Engineering & Physical Sciences Li-brary at the University of Maryland, has written that the “ubiquitouslibrary,” one which is “available anytime, anywhere,” is already here.16
The New Media Consortium’s 2005 “Horizon Report” notes the follow-ing among trends evident in discussions of “emerging technologieslikely to have an impact on teaching, learning, or creative expressionwithin higher education”:
Content is valued over format, meaning that consumers areless concerned with where content comes from or how it is pack-aged and more concerned with what it actually is.17
If I had no more concern for printed works than a municipal paperrecycler, I could ease Elizabeth Costello’s anxieties by telling herthat the “real thing” need no longer be limited to printed works, butonly to their content, made instantly available whenever anyone looksfor it, regardless of how it looks. Students and researchers can re-trieve a dozen or more versions of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderlandfrom the Web, pick one and extract whatever fragments might beneeded to complete a term paper or magazine article. They mightignore the fact that in many cases the specific edition being viewed isnot accurately identified. Perhaps, at some point in the future, it willno longer matter that the researcher has no idea what an actual bookcalled Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland might look like. “Elizabeth,” Imight say, “let go of the idea of having your words preserved onsheets of paper glued together at one end and sandwiched betweenrigid covers. Books once served a purpose, but they were such old-fashioned, thought-imprisoning contraptions. Damn the authenticityissues, Elizabeth, full blog ahead. At the sound of the tone, you arefree to move about the ubiquity.”
Not surprisingly, novelist William Gass and librarian John Swan,among others, do not see this as the long-awaited liberation of textsfrom the restraints of traditional containers, but as the tongue-twistingphenomena of “decontextualization and disembodiment,”18 in whichexcerpted materials are torn “from the whole fabric of memory.”19 Inpart this has to do with the as yet unsolved problem of making theexperience of reading book-length material less myopic. Nunbergobserves:
A computer doesn’t have to store texts in a form that corre-sponds to the space they occupy when they are displayed . . . for
Walter Cybulski 63
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
just this reason, there is no perceptible correlation between theboundaries of the texts we read on a computer and the physicalproperties of the artifact . . . So there is inevitably a sense of discon-nection between the text that is immediately present to the sensesand the text that stretches out indefinitely and invisibly on eitherside of it–reading Proust in a window is like viewing Normandythrough a bombsight. You cannot literally grasp an electronic textin its entirety.20
Uwe Jochum, a subject specialist at the Universität Konstanz Bibliothek,has written about “differences between corporeal libraries and non-corporeal databases or the Internet,” describing one difference as follows:
Only a corporeal library provides scholars and students witha mnemonic grid that is able to indicate the significance of a textby indicating its ‘place’ in the stream of tradition, whereas elec-tronic databases, which do not and cannot have a spatial memorygrid, are blurring the significance of texts. One may find ‘every-thing’ in a database, but what kind of thing it is, why it is signifi-cant, or why it is simply nonsense are questions that cannot beanswered by the database.21
A second difference:
A library as a body of tradition is linked to a community thatis participating in this tradition because it is the community’s owntradition. . . . as the French historian Maurice Halbwachs has de-scribed, a universal global memory is impossible since the collec-tive memory always relies on a group with boundaries in space andtime. . . . to maintain this group or community . . . we need memorydevices like books and libraries.22
Textual scholar G. Thomas Tanselle observes that when texts arepublished in book form, “form and content depend on one another,”adding that “the fullest and most rewarding kind of reading is a readingof the whole object conveying a text, not just the words”23 [my italics].Canadian archivist Carolyn Heald observes:
Reading texts for their non-textual information is part ofthe unique archival perspective. Unfortunately, the emphasis on
64 The Changing Book: Transitions In Design, Production, And Preservation
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
cultural artifacts has been gradually giving way to an emphasis oninformation–decontextualized, decentered, and destructive.24
This is not a new phenomenon. In 1980, Daniel Boorstin suggestedthat knowledge was “orderly and cumulative,” as opposed to informa-tion, described as being “random and miscellaneous.”25 Libraries,according to Boorstin, were not solely or primarily repositories of bitsof information, to be stored, retrieved, and delivered on demand, butplaces where works-in-progress can encounter works achieved . . . withinwhich writing meets and absorbs the written, thinking finds and appro-priates the thought . . .26
By contrast, today’s librarians seem to be developing institutions thatare “repositories of bits of information.” What are the side effects of thisreversal? In the July 18th 2005 issue of the Japanese newspaper YomiuriShimbun, it was reported that the Japanese House of Representativespassed a bill that promotes print culture, defined as “reading, writingand publishing books, periodicals and other cultural assets.” The billrequires that central and local governments “establish a sufficient num-ber of libraries to meet the needs of residents” and “increase the numberof books in school libraries and the number of librarian-teachers.”27
There are terms for the end of books, the end of libraries. There iseven a term for the end of librarians. Once described by some now-forgotten futurologists as “cybrarians” or “cybernauts” (astronauts of theinfosphere, space-age descendants of argonauts), librarians may now beon the verge of becoming digital age victims of “disintermediation.”This term is defined as the “substitution of ‘software solutions’ for pro-fessional services.”28 Isn’t it always the case that “futuristic thinking”uses language to promote the obsolescence of what came before? Whilerummaging around in Altavista for articles containing the term “decon-textualization,” I came upon an insightful comment by someone namedEva Ekeblad. “To me,” Eva seemed to be saying with a slight trace ofweariness in her tone, decontextualization “just seems to be a strangeand contorted way of talking about some contexts in the negative.”29
Perhaps there is a little Eva inside us all, patiently waiting for theubiquity to become something a bit less amorphous.
There are “e-miles” to go before the entire print contents of librariescan be made available online. Wisely, librarians and archivists continueto explore preservation options. “Born digital” works, described as“dynamically configurable and highly volatile information objects” inmore imminent danger of perishing than brittle books, are not withoutanalog backup options.30 If the risk is this serious, why aren’t librarians
Walter Cybulski 65
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
pursuing analog solutions with requisite urgency? Digital files can nowbe written onto bitonal, grayscale and color 35 mm microfilm of re-markable quality at reasonable cost. Archivists frequently have man-dates to preserve large quantities of records in analog form for legalpurposes. They currently comprise the major market for microfilm tech-nology. Will librarians, lacking such mandates, eventually abandonsuch analog reformatting options entirely?
Mass digitization efforts are underway, but from a preservation per-spective–which a librarian I spoke with once described as “cleaning upafter the parade”–scanning is only the beginning of an ongoing processto extend the useful life of the bit streams. There is currently no identifi-able point at which digital content can be left unmanaged in a “perma-nent” software and hardware configuration. Preservation librarians,among others, are working with electronic information specialists onarticulating and mapping out near-term solutions to the problem. Manylibrary administrators appear to be convinced that analog alternativescan be abandoned if “born digital” and digitized content are carefullyacquired, created, organized and managed. Ongoing digital asset man-agement is going to require a major investment of resources. Reposito-ries that must divert already scarce resources for this purpose are likelyto reduce levels of funding for traditional preservation and conservationprograms.
Beyond issues of asset management and cost, some interesting ques-tions have been raised about the effectiveness of the Web in meeting theinformation needs of “knowledge workers.” Outsell, Inc., a Burlingame,California research and advisory firm reports:
According to the new survey [of 2,000 knowledge workers],67 percent of professionals now go to the open Web for informa-tion, versus 79 percent in 2001. Fifteen percent rely on their corpo-rate intranets . . . nine percent consult their colleagues . . . In addition,when seeking information fewer now prefer to get it themselves . . .preferring to rely on regularly scheduled updates, members oftheir team, or their library.31
If anything, this turn of events makes it clear that things happen quicklyin the digital age. Just when you find yourself wondering if your libraryposition might be re-classified to “disintermediation specialist,” aweb-weary squadron of knowledge workers in need of your expertiseappears on the horizon.
66 The Changing Book: Transitions In Design, Production, And Preservation
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
COLLECTIONS ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE
W. G. Sebald has written that “those in whom memory lives on bringdown upon themselves the wrath of others who can continue to live onlyby forgetting.”32 The past of the printed word lives on in libraries, grow-ing with each year’s new acquisitions. It is in libraries that the printedword has a future. Books are not going to disappear any time soon, andlibrarians have no secret plans to replace them with digital surrogatesand have them hauled away to landfills. Such acts of forgetting wouldbe inexcusable.
I am happy to report that, at least for the immediate future, the situationis not quite this bleak. A recent British Library survey of professionalsin European, North American and Australasian libraries (including theLibrary of Congress, the National Library of Canada, and Harvard andYale) revealed a definite interest in digital, but low confidence in its ca-pability to serve as a preservation medium.33 According to one surveyrespondent:
Print is generally viewed as the archival format for nationaldeposit libraries, to be stored in optimum conditions to ensure itslongevity. Several national libraries are planning new storagefacilities. Collecting and storing print formats is currently seenas insurance against the volatility of the current state of digitalpreservation.34
Though books in libraries may not be going anywhere, they are in-creasingly being moved out of the way to make room for new publica-tions, or for people and workstations. Respondents were unanimous inreporting that they were “making provision for the storage of continuinggrowth of print formats,” adding:
It is not a question of storing either print formats or digital for-mats but, for the foreseeable future, both formats require archiving toensure long-term access to the collections of national libraries.35
The growing demand for space Elizabeth Costello mentions is byno means fictional. Continued storage of growing collections pre-sents a very real challenge. There may be e-miles to go, but we havebrick-and-mortar and three-dimensional artifact promises to keep.Preservation librarians are doing all they can to meet this challenge,combining ongoing collection management and preservation efforts with
Walter Cybulski 67
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
the development of secure, climate-controlled offsite storage facilitiesto accommodate incoming book acquisitions even as they grapple withthe preservation of digital materials.36 That is probably where we standnow: doing as much as can be done on all fronts with all availableresources.
If reports that electronic access to digitized content increases publicawareness of the print originals are true, the digital age offers librariansa unique opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to responsible cus-tody for print collections. It is an opportunity for librarians to transformtheir “on-site” facilities into places where books not only endure, butare also reconnected to the public (to which they belong), providingthem with facilities that inspire connectivity between the past and thefuture. Dr. David Lipman, Director of the National Center for Biotech-nology Information at NIH, identifies one of the key features of thisopportunity:
Collaboration is becoming more intensive in biomedicalresearch . . . with increased flow to and from users and increasinglycomplex information being exchanged. Although most of this iselectronic communication there is a critical role for bringing peo-ple together.37
The luminous windows of computer monitors may only bring readersinto contact with images of books, one image at a time, but in doing so itis inevitable that inquiring minds are connecting with texts in waysnever before possible. Incentives to enable contact with “the real things”in libraries must be cultivated and sustained for future generations.
CONCLUSION: WHAT IT MEANS TO ENDURE
Common sense dictates that not all copies of all titles can be retainedfor an indefinite future. If anything, the lessons of the past teach us thatthe survival of copies of some printed works can be precarious at best.There are many examples of works that somehow managed to escapethe abyss into which other titles known to have been published in thesame time period vanished. Only a small number of Sophocles’ playsare extant. As Eric Lindquist has pointed out, “of the probably hundredsof thousands of copies” of the New England Primer (printed beginningaround 1609), “only a handful survive, none before 1727.”38 DanielBoorstin likewise learned that copies of the Primer were “hard to find”
68 The Changing Book: Transitions In Design, Production, And Preservation
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
when he was doing some research on the religious experience of earlyNew Englanders.
Only eleven copies are believed to have survived of the first bookprinted in what is now the United States, Stephen Daye’s 1640 The WholeBooke of Psalms Faithfully Translated into English Metre, commonlyknown as “The Bay Psalm Book.”
Early imprints of “Horatio Alger” books, once popular and widelyavailable, may share a similar fate. Discussing what he called the“biases of survival,” Boorstin observed “how partial is the remainingevidence of the whole human past, how casual and accidental is thesurvival of its relics.”39
The act of rescuing printed artifacts from oblivion undoubtedly ap-peals to anyone with a sense of communal memory, of history. Encoun-tered first-hand in a collection, the “real thing” announces its presencewith an unmistakable power. In my own experience, I recall how visit-ing Chinese scholars were deeply moved by the discovery of copiesof an agricultural journal on a shelf in Cornell University’s Albert R.Mann Library stacks. They explained that the journal contained articlesby a colleague, no longer alive, whose writings had been banned anddestroyed in his homeland.
The moment serves as an example of how necessary it is for librariesto acquire and organize a wide range of materials into collections. It is acommitment not only to provide scholars and researchers with varietyand depth of subject coverage, but also to provide space on a shelf formaterial that, unknown to the collection builders, might face annihila-tion in the world beyond the library walls. In a constantly changingworld, as Boorstin noted, survival can be “chancy, whimsical and un-predictable.”40 Where, if not in the institutions created for this purpose,can the printed record of the past–in its original form–be expected toendure? The Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic describes how the survi-vors of catastrophic events (such as the disintegration of the formerYugoslavia) discover the lost or missing pieces of their own culture inthe repositories of another:
A quick visit to Harvard University’s Widener Library re-veals that the books of the most minor Macedonian, Croatian,Bosnian, and Serbian writers . . . are there, living an eternal life onsafe library shelves. And more than that: they are saved in the orig-inal, minor language in which they were written and published.41
Walter Cybulski 69
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
No doubt many librarians can tell similar stories. Such discoveries can-not be dismissed as mere coincidence or serendipity. It would be all tooeasy to shrug and say “so what? Why not just digitize it? Wouldn’t it besimpler for those writers to access that material online in their owncountries?” One answer is: “Yes, by all means go ahead–if you secure aplace and provide a well-managed future for the original.” Printedworks are kept “on safe library shelves” because someone identifiedthem as having sufficient value, relevance, significance, uniqueness orperhaps some combination of other intangible qualities that warrantedtheir inclusion in a collection.
Where books need most to endure is in the institutions that have beenestablished for this purpose. We have an obligation to the past, to humanhistory and memory, and to the authors who desired that their worksappear in print form, to keep books as they are, for as long as we can,using all the means at our disposal. Within the boundaries of fundingand copyright, librarians will continue to create digital versions of pub-lished works to meet the access needs of today’s scholars and research-ers. At the same time it must remain clear in our minds that librariesoffer the best hope for the ongoing care and custody of the real thing.
NOTES
1. Hartley, John, “Death of the Book?”–Paper presented at the Symposium ofthe National Scholarly Communication Forum and the Australian Academy of theHumanities, “Issues for Australian Scholars in Publish or Perish” Section, Sydney,March 2003. http://www.humanities.org.au/NSCF/bookfuture/PAPERSANDPPS/DOBHartley.pdf.
2. Coetzee, J. M., Elizabeth Costello (NY: Viking, 2003), p. 16. “Marie Corelli(real name “Mary Mackay”) was probably born somewhere in London in May of 1855. . . .After her first book, A Romance of Two Worlds, was published in 1886, she became thebest selling author in England, and the favorite of Queen Victoria, who ordered a col-lection of all Marie’s books. Despite the savage attacks of critics, her books often brokesales records. She was the only author invited to the coronation of Edward VII, andcounted among her friends Mark Twain. Tennyson wrote her praises for her workArdath (1889), a book which did not sell very well relatively, but the one Marie had al-ways considered her best. Marie Corelli’s books are imaginative, philosophical andmystical. She took it upon herself to cure the world of all its social ills. Among her bestworks are Thelma (1887), Wormwood (1890), Barabbas (1893), The Sorrows of Satan(1895), The Master Christian (1900), Temporal Power (1902), The Life Everlasting(1911), and The Secret Power (1921). After W.W.I., her books were consideredout-of-date and sales and interest declined. She died in 1924.” From The VictorianWeb, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/corelli/intro.html. Coetzee’s selection ofan author once popular but now largely unknown is undoubtedly intentional.
70 The Changing Book: Transitions In Design, Production, And Preservation
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
3. As if to reinforce Elizabeth’s belief that a copy placed in a national libraryacquires special significance, I recently received a letter from the National Register’sWho’s Who in Executives and Professionals informing me that “each annual edition isregistered in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.”
4. Ibid., p. 17.5. Donalson, Ian, “The Destruction of the Book” in Book History, Volume 1 (Uni-
versity Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 4. Horace quota-tion is from James Michie’s translation of The Odes of Horace (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1987).
6. Diringer, David, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, 2 Vols.(London: 1968), quoted in Alberto Mangual’s A History of Reading (NY: PenguinBooks, 1996), p. 192.
7. Mi³osz, Czeslaw, op. cit., “From the Rising of the Sun,” Section VI, “TheAccuser,” p. 320.
8. Ibid., p. 5.9. Coetzee, op. cit., p. 17.
10. The Jorge Luis Borges story “The Library of Babel” is frequently mentioned indiscussions of libraries. The James E. Irby translation from the Spanish was publishedin Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964).
11. Coetzee, op. cit., p. 17-18.12. See, for example: Wayne, Erika V. and J. Paul Lomio, “Book Lovers Beware: A
Survey of Online Research Habits of Stanford Law Students” (Robert Crown LawLibrary, Research Paper No. 2, June 2005). “In 2002, 75% of the first year classstated that they performed at least 80% of their research online; in 2003, this per-centage grew to 83%; and by 2004, the number had increased to 93%.” (p. 12).http://www.law.stanford.edu/library/wp/OnlineResearchSurveys.v211.pdf.
13. Birkerts, Sven, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an ElectronicAge (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 215.
14. Nunberg, Geoffrey, “Will Libraries Survive?” Archived page of The AmericanProspect, vol. 9, no. 41, Nov. 1, 1998–December 1, 1998, p. 4 of 11. http://www.prospect.org/ print/V9/41/nunberg-g.html.
15. “Ubiquitous Knowledge Environments–The Cyberinfrastructure InformationEther.” Background information for a joint NSF/JISC Post Digital Library FuturesWorkshop held June15-17, 2003. http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~dlwkshop/background.html.
16. Kaske, Neal K., “The Ubiquitous Library is Here.” Portal: Libraries and theAcademy, Vol. 4, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 291-297. http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v004/4.2kaske.html.
17. “Horizon Report–2005” (New Media Consortium, in collaboration with the Na-tional Learning Infrastructure Initiative). www.nmc.org/pdf/2005_Horizon_Report.pdf.
18. William H. Gass, “In Defense of the Book,” Harper’ Magazine 299, no. 1794(November 1999): 41-51.
19. John Swan, “Information and Madness,” Library Journal 113 (1 February 1988):25-28.
20. Nunberg, Geoffrey, “The Place of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction,”Representations 24, Spring 1993; reprinted in Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds.,Future Libraries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/places3.html, p. 4 of 15.
Walter Cybulski 71
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
21. Jochum, Uwe, “The Gnosis of Media,” The Library Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 1,Jan. 2004, pp. 21-41. Quote found on page 38.
22. Ibid. Jochum quotes material from Hawlbachs, Maurice, Das kollektiveGedächtniss (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991).
23. Tanselle, G. Thomas, “Texts and artifacts in the electronic era,” 21st C, issue3.2, Spring 1998. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/Issue-32/tanselle.html.
24. Heald, Carolyn, “Is There Room for Archives in the Postmodern World?”American Archivist, vol. 59, Winter, 1996, p. 95.
25. Dowd, Sheila, “Alexandria Revisited: Another Look at Space and Growth,”Collection Building, Vol. 9, No. 3-4, 1989, pp. 65-72. Quote is from Boorstin, Daniel,Gresham’s Law: Knowledge or Information? (Washington, D.C., Library of Congress,1980), p. 70.
26. Dowd, Sheila, op. cit. Quote is “from a memo by Berkeley English professorGeorge Starr to campus administrators” (p. 70).
27. “Reading, writing key to education, culture,” editorial in the Yomiuri Shimbun,July 18th, 2005. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/editorial/20050718TDY04008.htm.
28. Rory Litwin, “On Google’s Monetization of Libraries” Library Juice, 7:26–December 17, 2004. http://libr.org/Juice/issues/vol7/LJ_7.26.html.
29. Eva Ekeblad. Comment in a discussion thread. Since I have probablydecontextualized Eva’s remark, I offer her my apologies and hope it serves as a re-minder to me each time I hit that “send” button. http://lchc.uscd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcmail.1999_05.dir/0203.html.
30. Smith, Bernard, “Preserving tomorrow's memory: Preserving digital content forfuture generations,” Information Services and Use, Vol. 22, Nos. 2-3, 2002. http://iospress.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?wasp=63b9fdff48ab435ba9724a33c37e6900&referrer=parent&backto=issue,13,15;journal,10,24;linkingpublication-results, 1:103157,1.
31. “Outsell, Inc. Survey Shows Knowledge Workers Turning Away from the OpenWeb.” http://www.outsellinc.com/outsell/press%20room/pr_release/pr20050510_01.htm.Interestingly, the survey indicates that “both the time spent finding and analyzing/applying information are moving in the wrong direction. Knowledge workers nowspend 11 hours per week searching for information, versus 8 in 2001. . . . Collectively,the time spent gathering and looking for information translates to an estimated 5.4 bil-lion lost hours per year for US corporations.” So many knowledge workers, so littletime.
32. W. G. Sebald, “Between History and Natural History,” Campo Santo (NY:Random House, 2005), p. 82.
33. The British Library. “Digital versus print as a preservation format–expert viewsfrom international comparator libraries,” p. 1 of 4. http://www.bl.uk/cgi-bin/print.cgi?url=about/collectioncare/digpres1.html.
34. Ibid., p. 2 of 4.35. Ibid., p. 3 of 4.36. For additional information, see: (1) Catherine Murray-Rust, “Library Storage as
a Preservation Strategy,” Advances in Librarianship, Vol. 27 (Amsterdam: Elsevier,2004), pp. 159-183; (2) Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., Developing Print Repositories (Washington,DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, June 2003).
37. Ibid.
72 The Changing Book: Transitions In Design, Production, And Preservation
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4
38. Lindquist, Eric, “Books and the ‘Iniquitie or Wearing of Time’ ” in Who WantsYesterday’s Papers? Essays on the Research Value of Printed Materials in the DigitalAge (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. 11.
39. Boorstin, Daniel J., “A Wrestler with the Angel” in Hidden History (NY: VintageBooks, 1989), p. 4.
40. Op. cit., p. 6.41. Ugresic, Dubravka, “Questions to an Answer” in Thank You For Not Reading
(Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), p. 192. Translation into English ofZabranjeno citanje by Celia Hawkesworth.
doi:10.1300/J105v31n01_04
Walter Cybulski 73
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Ston
y B
rook
Uni
vers
ity]
at 1
6:44
29
Oct
ober
201
4