extreme materialist
“This seminar will bring together contemporary book artists specializing in medieval-inspired techniques of papermaking, bookbinding, and calligraphy, among others, with medievalists whose scholarship depends upon a knowledge of the intimate physical details of medieval manuscript production. Participants will bring to the seminar the draft of an unpublished essay that models extreme materialist readings of a medieval book as a case study that will be discussed by all of the seminar participants, each bringing his or her own expertise.” Obermann seminar, June 2-13, University of Iowa (from
Medieval Academy)
Stay tuned on this; Iowa prides itself on introspections of the discomforts between craftspeople and academics.
format options
The iPhone and its equivalent devices are today’s stand-ins for the functionality of the medieval
Book of Hours. This is because these personal electronic devices habituate us to secular prayers of connectivity and intercession. Our life of daily devotions is just as arranged as those of long ago and the functionality of the Book of Hours still identifies the pious and literate.
Another curiosity of this comparison is the role of the book format. The Book of Hours was the best seller of the manuscript era. Most people of the middle ages never even saw a Bible. The book format presentation of scriptures would need to wait the advent of printing. So this early functionality of the Book of Hours to schedule daily prayers was an expedient adaptation of an available format in a culture that favored rote devotional behavior. But this was not, like print schedules and directories, an optimal adaptation of the book format that would only emerge later. Then, as a format for knowledge transmission, the book found its optimal function in relation to both the Book of Hours and the iPhone.
preserving access
“Ironically, many librarians were unhappy with a 2005 OCLC report because one of their key findings was that in the public’s eye, the library brand is books. That finding is troubling if people think of libraries as ONLY about books. But we will be in much more trouble if our users stop thinking even that. Do you want a book? Go to Google or Yahoo or Amazon.com. Where will libraries be then?” Trudi Bellardo Hahn, on “Mass Digitization” in the January issue of Library Resources and Technical Services
It is time for libraries to take credit for the services that they perform which make the mass book digitization projects rational activities. For example, only libraries will image the deteriorated books. Corporate book digitization projects promote themselves as high production activities compared to the slow and careful reformatting of libraries, but these high speed capture projects cannot be bothered or delayed by difficult and fragile items. So, the library reformatting exactly complements and fulfills the mass conversion projects. In the same context, corporate conversion programs cannot be distracted by any standards of image quality and copy authentication which are so carefully achieved and maintained by library reformatting.
And what happens if a book must be (heaven forbid) rescanned? Just who is both mastering and backing-up these precarious, corporate fly-bys? And, finally, corporate book digitization assumes that you can have access without preservation. Is that really possible? Not if access is an activity across time and er, across generations. In that context preservation IS access.