futureofthebook.com

future of reading

“RIT faculty and students are conducting research on the experience of reading in print versus the screen,” says Patricia Sorce, professor and administrative chair of RIT’s School of Print Media. “The conference and the renowned speakers will provide a forum for interaction among participants to discuss whether the newer platforms deliver an enhanced reading experience or whether they detract from the enjoyment of reading and interfere with the comprehension of content.” 2010 Conference

How does the future of the book relate to the future of reading? How does the automobile relate to the highway system? Do you remember where you parked? Do you recall driving across Texas? While driving do you think about the car? Is there any strange noise? Is there any need for a sudden change of lanes? How well are you adapting to GPS display and the apparent neighborhood? With print the rubber hits the road and with screen a voice and arrow talk about a next turn. Who’s car is this? What is an automobile? Should we walk?

FotB will be there at RIT as an industrial spy. Probably walk over to Cayuga Street to visit Keith. Once we spent the night in the rain under the Rock Island railroad viaduct between Peru and Utica, Illinois. Be there and be square.

oxford companion

The Oxford Companion to the Book, a heavy two volume encyclopedia of 1327 pages, is just published perhaps representing a paper Wiki on the topic. There is a series of essays on nationalistic book history followed by an alphabetic listing of terms and biographic description. There are thousands of entries and thousands missing. Two that I looked up; “keyboard” and “book conservation” were not there. I did learn that Google scans books in 430 languages. There is a feeling of an early assumption that the only topic in the entire universe that should never be electronically delivered is the study of the book.

aura

If aura signifies a general quality of older books what is the anatomy of this? We certainly experience the energetic projection of meaning by lifeless objects. There is the overt content, just as you can open a box to see objects inside and also discover that other objects are not there. The authentic array of found objects surprises the investigator. There is also the container and how it opens and closes and any decoration inside or out. These features are not determined but discovered by the observer.

What is going on? Apparently deep self-authentication is radiating from the object or book. The depth of the radiation of meaning is surprising since it responds to any question with confirmation or denial from within its own qualities and without bias toward the observer. The confidence of the engagement is all on one side. Where did the confidence come from? The confidence comes from a past world, as a fossil, to which it is no longer connected, no longer responsive but evocative. It is immune to the present as if it is in a waiting room. We can read the exasperations of the object. Look at aura at Lorcan Demsey’s Weblog.

cool….

George Wheeler, Director of Conservation, Columbia University also made the connection (see previous date posting) between AIC membership rejection of professional certification and underlying mismatch of certification and the actions of practice. We should now “view the pursuit of a certification process not as a failed endeavor but the beginning of a new kind of conversation about definition, identity, and creation of a more intimate connection between thought and action, theory and practice in conservation.”

Another wise emeritus at AIC leaned over to remark that a research paper was so effective “at reducing variables that they were diminished to zero”. So now we must look open ocean and particularly at the specialty of library collection preservation where an autonomous certifying program of instruction has twice encountered an obstacle to sustainability.

a wrap

The action that separated orality from literacy was not the writing of language because this act was for a long time only a prompt for recitation. The transformational act was the folding of the writing substrate. Arbitrarily folding up the papyrus was the template for packet electronic delivery.

beyond slippery slope

“When it comes to the digital networks that now surround us, the fact is that most us can’t just GTFO, even if we wanted to. The sooner we move beyond the addiction metaphor, the sooner we’ll be able to see, with some clarity and honesty, the extent and implications of our dependency on our networked computing and media devices. What happens to the human self as it comes to experience more and more of the world, and of life, through the mediation of the screen?” Nicholas Carr

Potent postings over at Rough Type just now….don’t abstain the screen for the moment.

milwaukee

Powerpoint has enabled us to picture text in ways not possible with Carousel slides. The illustrations and graphics are frequently subverted to captions while the white text does the talking. I wish I knew the plugin to post my own Powerpoint in Word Press, but let me just say I will soon try to post my talk here.

It was a great meeting. I just don’t understand how ALA and AIC meetings are suddenly so explosively exciting. I was under an impression that real meetings were obsolete.

common knowledge

The array of student diversity is a fractal of the array of teaching diversity which is a fractal of the array preservation practice diversity which is a fractal of domains of documentary record transmission and that is a fractal of a dynamic of cultural sustainability. With fractal visualization any level provides the same complexity as any other. Trajectories between levels are products of choice and exclusion that present a democracy of opportunity.

books of the brave

Gary Frost will direct a two week project to install a comprehensive exhibit of the treasures of the Library of the Recoleta in Arequipa Peru. This education exhibit will depict the amazing story of historical libraries in this highland colonial city. Brought together over four centuries and across four oceans these books introduced European learning into equally complex indigenous culture and so advanced dynamics of empire still in motion in the Americas. The exhibit will also project legacies of book craft and book art that now suggest a lively future meaning for these collections.

The project team includes on-site cataloger and exhibit content author, Helen Ryan, on-site specialist bibliographer, Alvaro Meneses, UI Libraries conservator Gary Frost, assistant and support specialist, Joyce Miller and Center for the Book student Bill Voss.

learning library conservation 2.0

There is probably a relation between AIC certification and library conservation training, both dormant. The limbo of students without a school is accentuated by a limbo of AIC certification. What is the larger impasse here? What factors of sustainability are unmet or unmanaged?

Perhaps the target of certification is not appropriate. Another option, rather than certifying students, is to certify the certifiers. AIC and its specialty enclaves could certify instructional programs. These can range widely and may comprise composites that may not include a graduate conservation training program.

Once identified and certified the array of instructional programs can provide a wide assortment of opportunities for the interested student. The student need not follow a linear sequence, but graduate from one to another, perhaps with a recommended goal of a three year sabbatical. A clearing house office, modeled on the PBI, could be maintained and lend a name to the composite training sequence.

There is a legacy logic to the learning sabbatical derived from apprenticeship, but the important adjustment to contemporary needs is circulation between various instructional programs. The student is both sampling and sequentially advancing. Typical student epiphanies and rebellions are easily accommodated.

Another needed layer is high diversity of instructional programs, from municipal craft centers, to academic book studies, to technical and scientific courses, to studio workshops and factory settings. The diversity must be wide to engender a whole ecology of learning which is now so prerequisite for practice.

This multi-context learning approach, taken seriously, will breed its own details. The students will learn, the instructional programs will learn and the certifiers will learn and that dynamic will be sustainable and invigorating.

hmmm…

“But, maddeningly, the cause or causes of the market’s wild swing remained elusive, leaving what amounts to a $1 trillion question mark hanging over the world’s largest, and most celebrated, stock market.”

It was interesting to watch the attentive counting of paper ballots in the recent English election. The very close result, slowly tabulated, is apparently trusted. At the same time other sectors of stock exchange and automotive engineering continue analysis of unintended effects of transition to electronic delivery. We can also wonder, as libraries transition to mixed print and screen services, about surprises in culture transmission.

midnight bus

(See you some weeks later with reports on AIC, Peru and RIT Future of Reading…..)