ALA mid-winter meeting, 2010
The mid-winter meeting provided three 10-hour days of symposium and conference on library and archival preservation. Interest sectors included administration, digital conversion and digital preservation, conservator/curator forum, book production, media reformatting, collections storage and practitioner education. In all sectors, reports of fundamental transformation resulted in the most intensive mid-winter in a decade.
Recent transformations have inverted established concepts. For example, digital preservation practice now drives physical collection practice; emerging standards, methodology, influence, funding, and staffing. Other inversions include redefinition of print book production by electronic on-demand technologies and the dissolve and decommission of curricular education for practitioners in the wake of immense redefinition of skill sets.
The rapid build-out of infrastructure is pretty amazing in context of current economics and paradoxes are popping up everywhere. Risk assessment for high density collection storage has undergone revision following adverse fire, water, smoke damage simulation. Tools and agencies for certification of digital repositories have emerged and are now evaluating persistence of content in domains such as Google Print, HathiTrust, Portico and Jstor. Library binding is disappearing by double digits every quarter but the industry is thriving with reinstallation for print-on-demand technology and with new market interfaces such as LuLu, Lightning Source, (Amazon) BookSurge and all kinds of POD publishers. The digitization infrastructure for conversion from analog sources is also now building out a vender and service base and industrial NISO standards. Even Boston taxis now provide navigation screens for the passengers.
What does it all mean? For the library it means a revamped preservation policy and some relevant strategic planning. For the classroom it may mean some repositioning to turn both book studies and book arts toward a different humanist issue in which simulation supplants its sources. Physical books and their associated crafts and arts may be redefined.
On both library and classroom fronts there is uncertainty of the continuing role of physical media in a context their own screen simulations, displays and deliveries. I suggest that a keyword here is continuing. We need some demonstration of the persistent interdependence of print and screen. We probably need, for example, a logic connection between book crafts and computer navigation or some wide perspective on the imperatives of the keyboard or hand-held ownership contrasted with lecturn or desktop reading devices. We need some consideration of mobile reading behaviors. The interdependence logic can follow the self-authentication of print and the self-indexing of screen reading. There is also the print confirmation contrasted with screen dissolve of the bibliographic unit. When Google displays three million print books it is really suggesting that it displays and parses a single book.
We are in some kind of surge in new reading behavior and an associated technology build-out unmatched since the end of the 19th century. And a whole ethical dimension of stewardship of the cultural record is now drawn in. In my view, a useful alignment here is with the destiny of the book. This is a timely cause in the hybrid situation between print and screen. Apt or inept, it will still be useful to have a concerted center of advocacy, education and practice that is focused on persistent function of physical books and a persistent interdependence of print and screen.
book to nook
Why is it that the churn of dedicated hand-held reading devices can side step the most obvious opportunity? What is needed is a direct interface between such devices and print books. …Duh, a copier/scanner that captures pages from bound books and streams them directly, port or wifi, into a hand-held reader. One sweet aspect here is the sale of print prior to device display. Another is the invigoration of print library collections. Another is a side step of paper waste.
I saw all the latent technologies and applications on the exhibit floor at ALA midwinter…but the dots were not connected. Most arrays had output to desk-top, not hand-held, and used face down, not face up, book capture.