big heads on ebooks
An industrial spy from FotB accidentally ended up in an ALCTS big heads meeting between publishers, library book venders and acquisition heads on the future of academic monographs. The anxieties continue as they array and model the electronic and print formats. Transition to ebook advocates view print on demand as the contraction of the future of paper while librarians view this sector as an indicator of expansion of print.
All shared an uncertainty of what ocean of communication the ship of books was in. About their only bearing was “follow the reader”, but then they parsed the reader into infinite behaviors.
FotB tends to look deep and does see the shared embedded behaviors of bionic reading and the ergonimic of comprehension. Down deep is where the paper book works, not to mention persistence of academic conventions of the print monograph.
preservation 101
We have spent a generation confusing and merging preservation and access. Perhaps, it is now time to again distinguish preservation services from access services. This is especially relevant as preservation departments adventure into digital preservation.
A preservation curriculum for “21st century” librarians may only enhance the confusion of preservation and access service menues. Topics such as the open source movement actually have distinctive preservation or access implications while other topics such as copyright or web delivery have small relevance to preservation services as contrasted with access services.
The preservation field needs to map and distinguish its unique services and its unique expertise in assuring a continuing role for source originals in the context of digital delivery.
reformatting
Meaning accrues to the source and not to the surrogate. What Nicholson Baker was lamenting is the circumstance of the surrogate (microfilm) replacing the original (newspaper) as the surviving source. Yes, digitized versions of books and documents engender new meaning but this meaning resides in the original.
What we can lament is a culture that will divert accrued meaning away from sources as happens when legacy formats, once digitized, are disregarded or discarded.
042 and 583
Fields for 042 (institutional digital repositories) and 583 (preservation descripters) are converging to indicate commitment to preserve, but mapping the activites to be recorded at 583 will ultimately define the boundaries of preservation services as contrasted with digital access services.
The status for 583 objects is “committed to preserve”. The layers and shades of commitment are not that different from those of the legacy collections, but the layers and shades of digital preservation services are new and churning.
There are also the issues of the connectivity between presentational formats of this data .what will librarians see, what will researchers see and what will preservation project managers see. Here one of Walter Cybulski’s admonitions comes into play. As he stated it; “The need to explain everything everywhere is the doom of cataloging.” This is especially so when individual institutions follow their legacy patterns of doing what they wish to maintain their digital library resources in a context of google searching and browser presentation.