ipad magazine
“The Amazon Kindle, released in ‘07, lacks the multimedia capabilities of the iPad with its HTML5 video, color photos and ability to run complex interactive apps. One of the the Amazon device’s advantages when it comes to text — that its screen doesn’t act like a glowing computer screen, but like a faithful electronic reproduction of a physical book — becomes a disadvantage with next-generation formats. These formats attempt not only to port the reading experience onto an electronic device, but to take fuller advantage of the capabilities of modern phones and especially tablets, with their larger screens.”Wired
Its no accident that magazine format migration to iPad is reported by Wired. High fashion has it that the Web is so over for serious reading. For librarians there has always been another skew. This is that journal trends need not prefigure book trends which, even together, need not prefigure trends for magazines. The periodic, elaborated reading experience of a well designed magazine is unlike other format genres.
The small question is if the iPad presents a “next generation format” or if the magazine was just momentarily sequestered in print.
forgotten characters
“As software obviates the need for Chinese to sketch by hand the characters that make up their written language, they are coming to realize that those characters are being erased from their memories.” Nicholas Carr
Meanwhile back in up-start Western reading, the real template of print, exemplified by the lock-up of metal type, has vaporized from our understanding of the image of text. As we watch silent delivery from the copier, sheet after sheet, it is mildly curious that they are all different.
“Does the page look like an original? A good page of letterpress is an original. It is not a picture of a page of type…” Warren Chappell
” Books are communicative instruments so vital to civilization that their production must not be consigned wholly to automatic means, whether industrial, technological, or economic; in the process of transmitting culture, they embody it, and therefore need to undergo the vicissitudes of the human condition so that they will reflect our common experience truly.” Harry Duncan
arl statistics
The Association of Research Libraries has been gathering statistics on unit time production of preservation department treatments. This has been going on for 25 years and absent a conversion to digital time measure, the unit durations of 15 minutes, 1 hour and 3 hours have not changed one second.
I suggest the ARL choose a standard treatment for each of twelve months. March can be drop-spine boxes, July can be recording disc or magnetic tape cleaning, and September can be book repair board rehinging…that’s the idea. Each library simply watches and counts that one procedure each month. At the end of the year we start through the same count categories again. In 25 years it will be easy to track trends in treatment services.
Such tabulation also generates incentives, treatment diversity and fun.