extreme materialist
“I am thrilled to report that we are the participants for the University of Iowa Obermann Center 2008 Summer Research Seminar on Medieval Manuscript Studies and Contemporary Book Arts: Extreme Materialist Readings of Medieval Books. Meanwhile, I will be getting back to you soon with a very approximate schedule to give you a sense of what we will be up to for two weeks, and a list of shared readings to give us all some commonalities before we start.” Jonathan Wilcox
openlibrary
“The
site contains some 20 million bibliographic records from LC and participating libraries, and some of the leading lightsósuch as Karen Coyle, Roy Tennant and Brewster Kahle–are helping to shape the vision of a networked, wiki-style catalog that will be shared by libraries, publishers and the general public.”
” I donít know if this particular venture will succeed, but the ideaówiki-style cataloging by multiple contributors in a networked environment (directly on the web)–is surely in our future.” Randy Roeder
age of large-scale digitization
The suggestion for libraries, as conveyed by the CLIR
paper on ìPreservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitizationî, is that the books are moving out and digital resources are ìmovingî in. This is considered an inevitability. No one would guess that the libraries could actually follow the books. No one can imagine that digital preservation services can be built on a premise of print mastering. No one can imagine that a scenario of back-up reliance on screen surrogates is much more implausable and unsustainable than a scenario of back-up reliance on paper.
And another premise is not yet fully emerged. ìGarbage in, garbage outî is a dictum from the old days of early computing. ìQuality in, garbage outî could emerge in the new days of screen delivery of print. On the positive side inherent complementaries and syncopations between commercial and institutional digitization of print could result in a momentous, unbiased advance in access to printed works. On the dark side, the only un-conflicted attribute of large-scale commercial digitization of print appears to be its large-scale. Institutions, accomplished in their standards for reformatting, have abandoned both standards and scholarly obligations, and now appear transfixed by size alone.
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