library of congress googlizes itself
“A $2 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation inaugurated the LOC book digitization project. One of the grant’s objectives was “to address some of the issues that other book digitization projects had mainly avoided dealing with — for instance, the brittle book issue,” Handy said. “We established some procedures and preservation treatments to be able to scan books that otherwise couldn’t be scanned.” The library also worked with Internet Archive — which provided the scanning equipment — to develop a special station for scanning fold-out materials such as maps.
Before and after scanning, a librarian inspects each book for damage — what Handy calls “preservation triage.” Ten scanning specialists sit at “Scribe” scanning stations. In each Scribe, two digital cameras hover over the open book on a mechanized tabletop. The specialist positions the book for accurate scanning, snaps the digital photos with a foot pedal, then turns the page and scans the next pages. The teams can scan 1,000 volumes per week. Hours after scanning and inspection, the books are available on the Internet.
The Library of Congress is producing a report on best practices for dealing with brittle books and fold-out materials that it plans to post on its Web site and share with the Internet Archive and other members of the Open Content Alliance “so it’s available to anybody,” Handy added.
The scanned books are retired to an environmentally controlled storage facility at Fort Meade, Maryland, “where they will not be served again, they will be preserved,” he said.”
Here, ultimately, is realization of the public digital library for access to print collections. Note the careful interplay between print and screen and the continuing role of leaf masters as authenticators of their own simulations. Note the recognition of the multimedia nature of legacy print production with regard to fold outs, diagram and illustration and layers of paratext. Note the priority regard for books in poor condition as an indicator of their inaccessibility in print. Note the changed status of the originals. Now LOC needs to work with WolframAlpha as well as IA. Let’s return attentive organization to library collections as well!
The LOC project points to the needed better understanding of the strategic future role of print. There is an eerie interdependence of print and screen; almost an emergent system. Understanding the role of one will assist understanding of the role of the other.
The elegant cost combining of storage and display in print is one clue and so is the self-authenticating role of print relative to its own simulation. Then there are efficiencies of para-text features and the possibilities that context searching (WolframAlpha) is as productive as word parsing. In the longer run we do need further evolution of the artifact of bionic reading and that will take the whole culture of the skill.
future of library binding
Library binders have a base product of quality “hard cover binding”. Can library binders follow a strategy to multiple delivery channels and find new markets? Already library binders are diversifying into services for the self-publishing sector and specialty, short run publishers. What other markets can be germinated as delivery channels increase?
One possibility is to market print copies to e-readers. As hand-held reading devices are more widely assimilated they begin to extend screen reading well beyond book formats. Here library binders can encounter entirely new markets as the attributes of print are extended to personalized experiences, place-based and community commemorations and an expanding scope of documentary versions of events; reformatted transient reality. Print editions of websites and blogs, for example, are challenges but once resolved they become proprietary advantages.
An obstacle is perceived obsolescence of print versions of screen reading. Here library binders are well positioned to overturn market perceptions as well as their own conventions of thought. Print is a confirmation of rare value in an infinity of transient screen transaction. Print and screen are interdependent.
So what is the euphemism of hard cover binding? It is the elegant physical state of elegant conceptual work. That inherent paradox is a proprietary secret of library binding. Another proprietary secret of library binding is that an elegant reading device promotes reading. Outright promotion of reading has been neglected by publishers.