futureofthebook.com

blogbib biblog

The whole story on
librarian blogs by Susan Herzog.

what is there not to like?

The overlaps are not. One privileges the latest and the other privileges the earliest, one mines information the other organizes it. Google can image the whole print universe and it wonít make any difference. They are blind to queries that originate in print. Google provides a screen to print, not print to screen reading behavior.

Curiously, the reading behavior associated with the web has been around much longer than the carefully developed reading behavior associated with the relatively recent invention of print. There is an illusion that the web is new because of the integration of verbal/visual communication to a single screen display. But, effervescent, face-to-face communication is as old and the anarchy of everyone figuring out the world on their own is old too.

newly legible texts from Antiquity

Don’t try this with computer media, but papyri from Antiquity, retrieved from middens, are proving readable. A 20% increase in the surviving corpus of Greek texts is anticipated.

almost rave review for FotB

“42-5025
Reviewed in 2005may CHOICE.
[Visited Jan'05] This egocentric site lacks cohesion of content, user-friendly navigation, and overall context. Navigation and general appearance are the primary problem; quality content can be found if the user is predisposed to spend the time necessary to locate information serendipitously. The main page requires a left/right scroll to view its entire content; it includes a calendar with dates that link to site content without apparent purpose or rationale. There is in general a great deal of scrolling required, each page being long with content randomly placed and lacking cohesion to the whole. The overall appearance is plain and short on visual interest, particularly unfortunate for a Web site that addresses the artistic elements of “the book.”

Graphics are present but without apparent purpose or relationship to content. Topics and individuals are discussed without sufficient introduction or rationale. Glossaries, when finally located, are useful but vague in substance in an apparent attempt to be clever. There is a bibliography of book history, but many of the titles seem out of place in the list. The Commentary and Reports pages are filled with some good content, but they lack descriptive abstracts of the articles to entice the browser into reading the full text. The Links page is cluttered, unorganized, and almost impossible to read, with little to no description or annotation; many of the links are dead. The search box is of little use since the purpose and audience are not readily apparent from the Introduction. This Web site is for family, friends, and the interested eccentric–not for academic use. Other than a list of workshops at the University of Iowa and repeated reference to the site author, there is no reference for site responsibility or credentials. Summing Up: Not recommended.” –C. B. Hudson, University of Scranton

disambiguation; start query with ìbooksî

Google is a capture and retrieval engine, not a digital collection builder, so the
Google Print and Google Scholar products do not supplant library service. And the Google products are blind to reading scenarios based in print, but augmented with on-line engines. For Google, its screen-to-print, not print-to-screen.

So the Google dictum; ìto organize the worldís information and make it accessible to allî, is somewhat hollow. Librarians organize, Google mines. And the Google view that screen based reading is equivalent to page based reading is suspect, considering the differing reading behaviors entailed. What is authentic is a new research method demanding both screen and print reading skills.

Amazon book surge

“Through cutting-edge technology,
BookSurge can create a professional, bound book using the finest materials. Attractive cover and interior designs are available for the choosing and can be combined to match any type of genre ñ a work of fiction, a family cookbook, a childrenís color book, a book of verse or collection of photographs ñ and your book is always in stock and always ready to ship within 48 hours.”

ACRL Minneapolis

Faculty and administration may see the removal to storage as a loss of print status while it will actually provide an ascent in status as trusted retention, improved security and storage environment and last copy identity are assigned to the stored print materials.

Re: Multi institution, virtual storage; “We never weed stored collections.”

A FAQ about Google’s interest in digitizing library collections is; “Isn’t that done already?” An implication of this question is that the digitization of library print holdings may eventually succeed – but won’t make any difference. Why will it necessarily accentuate critical thinking or efficient research?

The Google Print engine design is also blind to possibilities for queries that originate in print and may use the Google engine to augment print research.

Re: 81 million NextGen readers; “They are format agnostics.”

The long continuity of graphic-to-print suggests that the freshness of Zines is actually a surprise with the surging relevance of a paper based genre in the context of screen publication.

Re: alternative publication; “Zines are primary documents.” And for libraries, they just aren’t ephemeral enough.

ACRL Minneapolis

emerging technologies conference

Here is an interesting
format; produce your own lecture series with a focus on ebooks.

let Google digitize your brittle book program

“We are not interested in a fixed amount of spending for a set of titles selected by the University of Michigan from digitized versions of their holdings. We may be interested in purchasing individual titles of our choosing at about $40 to replace brittle or lost books or to fill in our collection with titles we would like.”

Collection Development Team, University of Iowa

old literacies and new ones

Another thing to mention is that the conventions of page layout are not as old as the propensities to identify and read pattern in the nature world. Actually exemplars of the papyrus page, beautiful Greek letter Coptic on the half square page, that are millennia old are only recent instances of pattern interpretation.

A much older convention of reading left no such trace. It initiated text interpretation and text sharing and helped to set the conventions of the page. It also diverted the hominid series from a strict behavioral path to a path of literacy. This early literacy was the identification and interpretation of animal tracks. This literacy of great works has disappeared.

What is odd is that we still know the exemplar of the papyrus page. We know it and have it in our catalog of pattern depiction because the exemplars actually survive to the present day. This is really odd. All of the conventions of writing and typography interrelate because the exemplars survive side-by-side.

I wonder if the exemplars, the conventions and esthetics of screen based reading best compile into a literacy similar to animal tracking. This would then be a literacy lost within each generation and conveyed only as a temporary exemplar without context in a persistent physical medium.