scrivener
“New York-based theater collective Group Theory probes the psychosonic landscapes of Herman Melville’s classic novella Bartleby, the Scrivener in an intimate chamber ritual that transforms the private act of reading into a communal encounter. A strange literary-theatrical hybrid, this Bartleby is a performed palimpsest of rereadings, a hyper-lucid window onto a famously difficult text in all its haunting ambiguity and violent comedy.”
This off-Broadway production by futureofthebook.org refugee Ben Vershbow echoes Terry Belanger’s production of Samuel Johnson at home.
residual risks
An OCLC report rates risks of transition in the operation of US research libraries. Risks apparent are those associated with unexamined continuation of practitioner routines and collection agendas but corrective measures also engender their own risks. So the challenge is optimal navigation of the assured transition. So suggests the report.
Many other sectors have already encountered subtle and then disastrous consequence from transition of physical product to electronic delivery. So far the libraries have adventured as much as possible into on-line access and digital resource while continuing maintenance of print. Now the time has arrived for libraries to deliberately align or dis-align with the strategic plans of their parent institutions.
The most decisive position will be alignment with direct service to faculty first and administrative agenda secondarily. As with the canny local support for public libraries, faculty strategists are finding their best agenda is support of the library, not only as an expedient buyer of resources, but as a mediator of the compounding and shifting multiplicity of the media that scholars must now navigate daily.
The implication of the assured transition from print to screen is also theme to the skewed ITHAKA S+R faculty survey (see below). The “same direction” trend of all disciplines to increasing dependence on screen resources should be tempered by any relevance of growth from a zero base. Advent of telegraph resulted in wide ranging dependence too.
future history of publishing
A floating format, a serialized novela, on the history of publishing 2010 to 2020 is useful. The collapse of the large publishing houses echoes the subtle and then disastrous possibilities of industrial sectors that mismanage electronic delivery of physical product.
Other features of the future include the rise of smaller scale independent publishers who collude with freelancing application developers and authors to produce exactly the works that customer profiles outline.
It will also be a surprise to learn of the resurgence of the physical book.
logic of logic
Print books are manipulated directly as prerequisite to access. Interdependence of content and format is taken for granted and the print book reading experience rehearses and confirms a merge of artifact and information.
Does the logic of interdependence of material format and content reading in the print book template another interdependence between the print and screen book? Perhaps if print plays the role of artifact and screen plays the role of information.