futureofthebook.com

bottleneck

Antiquity favored the scroll. Later Eastern, Western and Islamic religious cultures favored the manuscript codex. Subsequent church cultures moved to the printed book. Current, more secular, cultures favor the screen. A sequential diorama of the four p’s; papyrus, parchment, paper and phone, depicts transmission and library cycles. The advent of more secularist culture and its media identity is signaled today. Constraint on the use of phones while driving is not construed as religious persecution. Social transmission, library roles, and median history are increasingly screen based.

The library role is central to the transmission and continuity of media history. The book format as been central to this history and this paradigm is now augmented by screen display. Library services, even library exhibits, are moving to the phone. An increasing dependence on screen display has shifted focus from textual content to audio and video content. This is apparent at mid-winter ALA with intense preservation attention to non-paper formats and their collections.

Library preservation has assumed a vital role in the transitions and transfers, but preservation centrality is also a feature of times of transition. We are at a bottleneck moment that emphasizes preservation. Collections were built across eras of higher availability of the given works acquired. Increasing unavailability and rarity of items emphasizes preservation. Brittle book processing comes to mind. But if we now pass to higher availability of screen displays that crosses the whole expanse of media history, the preservation role could become less apparent.

The preservation role could become invisible at a moment when greater emphasis is justified. No popular concern with preservation will associate with the abundances of screen display. Even the limits, deletions or outright interruptions of screen display will not directly associate with the need for preservation.

new normal

Future of collections has shifted from an assumption to a renegotiation. High-density storage, providing assisted living for collections, is the topic of conservators and curators (RBMS) and preservation planners (PAIG). Everyone is appraising the best way to attend remotely to aging physical collections. Meanwhile phone based library services delivery has shifted focus to audio and visual content that is abiding on non-paper media.

The take-home is that all physical collections are now special. This transition plays on the old dichotomy of Special and General collections that is now subsumed. The current reality is that real things, including last copy repositories for survivors, need separate management and are ancillary. All reality is special and a bit optional.

Collections types lament over lack of influence and disarrayed decisions, but it has ever been so. We need to actively advocate for and define the continuing role of physical collections, for back-up, mastering and authentication, in context of their screen simulations.

mid-winter

Here in Dallas. The suite kitchen here is fully equipped with everything for baking and cooking and serving an elegant buffet for 14. The toaster is excellent. Or you can dine at an incredibly cheap luxury restaurant. Order off the lunch menu and get a massive dinner with very fine entrees and imported beer for $15. The shower and toilet run massive amounts of water, so the drought must be a myth. I have a magnificent living room with huge bathroom and huge walk-in closet. I am next door to the worlds largest book store and just a block from a huge museum of biblical art with a feature on the King James. Close at hand is a mall of all the luxury retailers. The gated communities are wonderlands of gardens and security.

The rich need not pay much, either taxes or living expenses. They can watch every penny. Meanwhile lest fortunate must pay at highest levels for the least services and accommodation. It all makes sense to those on the very top. I hope I am not being too negative. Happily librarians are coming to town.

churn

From a historical perspective the productive career of the practitioner was once assured by integrated learning on the job. Considering collections care and bookwork where there was an endless period of instruction adapted from craft trades. Increasing specialization for library preservation benefited from this assured apprenticeship.

Career performance was complicated as library media and library delivery service became evermore diversified. As with other trends in media history, multiplicity increased. Gradually the previous generation had less practice to convey to the current. By the end of the 20th century each generation of library and archives preservation practitioners needed a different education.

That trend, of career deviation, as routines and methods of one generation became distinct from those of the previous, complicated productivity. As changing library services and an expanding scope of collection building proceeded, practitioner proficiency was disturbed. This trend has continued and a current working career is no longer coherent. The single generation of practitioners must literally shift careers and retrain multiple times.

The resilience and intelligence needed is great and the work is exciting and challenging, but the momentous trend does need some scrutiny. How can a career of practice move from stable preparation to constant re-learning? What aspects of practice prove most volatile and which are more persistent? These questions are well addressed in Paul Conway’s “Preservation in the Age of Google”.

But, how can the full duration of a working career be best adapted to rapid change? One excellent counter to the churn of library and archives preservation is ancillary book studies. The history of books and the nature of their qualities, both paper and screen display, offers perspective and continuity in a context of disconcerting change. Crafted experience of historical structures and technologies can calm distress over disruptions in the workplace.

churn2

at least three topics spun out of the centrifuge of a three hour cic preservation officers discussion. (1) storage of digital versions of non-paper legacy media, (2) management of legacy media storage, (3) churn of organizational structures for preservation and the increasing overhead of staff retraining.

(1) Hathi Trust has little interest in storage of digital versions of legacy (copies of analog magnetic or film) and internal options are drying up as the size of digital collections increases. Methods for validation and ingestion have emerged but that is not related to storage capacity or legacy media accommodation.
(2) Originals of legacy media cannot be repository stored without item description. Ideally these items would also be digitally transferred prior to storage but that should not forestall their curation and is not likely to be funded. Internet Archive may store legacy film copies. Strategy forward should also factor potential continuing acquisition or growth of legacy media.
(3) Concern for legacy media and born and transferred digital has repositioned preservation practice. This shift is caused and skewed at the same time by drastic library reorganizations, all different. Staffing is improving but at a cost of an increasing service menu. New positions fill in digital preservation practices. Overhead of retraining, retooling and reassigning existing staff is great with intended consequences countered with unintended. “What we must do in the next year is not the same as what we must do three years from now.” (Sherry Byrne)

book art

The book format is already loaded with meaning and expectation. Any artistic manipulation is then actively counter defined by the format. Appropriations stream back and forth and intentions and unintended consequences mix together. This circumstance of a third agent acting between art and artist distinguishes book arts.

The bungee like connections of intended and unintended consequence provokes other questions. Why is the classical reflex between manuscript and print or reformation and counter-reformation or textual and visual literacy so dynamic and so persistent? Is print determinacy at work to provide an underlying continuity of all cultural, religious, and scientific change? What keeps the book wedged among other media? Will the book subsume its own latest side effect of combined print and screen delivery?

bonefolder

“What set the Bonefolder apart was that from the outset it was designed to be open access and freely available to any and all online. It was the online only nature that allowed us to reach the audience we did with over 250,000 downloads over our 8 years and a presence in just about every library’s catalog.” Peter Verheyen

We now have the last issue of BoneFolder and it is a wonderful example of the series. This journal has provided an Ellis island of all the cultures that would make-up a nation. The relations of the diversity of features would still be difficult to chart as it required the whole sequence even to appreciate their scope. It is larger than book arts. The scope is closer to the qualities of physical books as depicted on-line.

Qualities of physical books depicted on-line is some kind of editorial paradox but the staff and Peter grappled directly with the challenges. The clean design and attractive two-column layout provided the perfect, conflicted, visual experience. We can also be appreciative of the energy and production of the authors.

BoneFolder is in the league of Fine Print and BookWays but it also enlarged the legacy. Now the momentum is handed off to the forthcoming journal of the Collegiate Book Arts Association. That larger organization will probably take more possession of its journal. Perhaps it will wish to take possession of the discipline of artists’ use of book formats. PDF?

a moment in book history

The book now spans both print and screen formats. Close attention to this circumstance of mixed delivery options reveals a surprisingly complementary and interdependent relation of affordances and a third stance going forward.

Enclaves of library preservation, academic book studies, and studio book arts are moving beyond contentions or “tipping points” to a fulcrum position of interaction between print and screen books. Other, wider sectors of publishers, educators, authors and information technologists are also assembling a composite stance.

Here are a few recent works that begin to establish the composite stance.
SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION: Transferred Illusions, Digital Technology and the Forms of Print, Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, 2009.
BOOK STUDIES: The Book in the Renaissance, Andrew Pettegree, 2010 and Divine Art, Infernal Machine, The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending, Elizabeth Eisenstein, 2011.
DESIGN FOR READING: How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak, 2011 and Breaking the Page, Transforming Books and the Reading Experience, Peter Meyers, 2012.

What if lively interaction between screen and print is, itself, the future of the book? So far this has been true! Screen books and paper books define each other as they diverge in genres, display and connectivity. Synchronized divergence reveals the self-authenticating print book a counterpart of the self-indexing screen book.