Is There a Text in This Library? History of the Book and Digital Continuity (original) (raw)

This essay argues for the importance of the study of production, distribution, and the cultural impact of texts for digital librarianship. An argument is made for integrating historical viewpoints in coursework that can prepare master's library and information science (MLIS) students for the curatorial aspects of digital librarianship. Several components of that approach are discussed in this essay. Their application in the classroom using a course on American bestsellers which involved collaborative teaching using the Internet as a case study, is presented as well. This paper reveals how book historians may find new roles as interpreters of the transformation of the library, from a logocentric library, which traditionally provides a fixed physical framework within which texts are accessible to users, to a soft library delivered on distributed servers - as a knowledge continuum. The emergence of new modes of textual transmission, the changing concept of the text, and the need to create new social spaces in which texts are collected and used can benefit from an awareness of the production, distribution, and use of text in traditional media environments.

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Digital Libraries in the New Millennium: Partners, Publishers, Potentials, and Pitfalls

As we move into the new millennium it is difficult not to fall into a predictive state of mind. To do this effectively, one needs to look back in order to look forwards in any informed manner. What follows then is a view of the role of the digital library couched in terms of an examination and explication of the part of such a library that I have built at the University of Virginia. The Electronic Text Center, by now a mature service and an ingrained part of our library system, works well as a testing ground for larger digital library issues and definitions. We are variously partners, publishers, researchers into issues and librarians serving a user group which is rapidly diversifying and whose expectations rise constantly. As I look to our achievements and ambitions, and to those of colleagues in other digital libraries, I see the potentials greatly outweighing the pitfalls in the fledgling digital libraries and electronic publishing houses, but both exist in abundance. Since its inception in 1992, the Electronic Text Center has been an integral part of the University of Virginia Library. From this early start, and from the concentration on long-term, online, standardized data, we have built up considerable expertise in our staff and a driving momentum in our local user community. The Center combines an on-line archive of tens of thousands of SGML-encoded electronic texts and images with a library service that offers hardware and software suitable for the creation and analysis of humanities text (1). Through ongoing training sessions and support of teaching and research projects(2), the Center has built a diverse user community locally, serving thousands of users globally, and providing a model for similar humanities computing enterprises at other institutions. Accounts of our digital library work have appeared in publications as diverse as The Economist, The Chemical and Engineering News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Australian Financial Review. The Electronic Text Center is staffed by a combination of full-and part-time positions, including graduate students drawn from various humanities departments at the University of Virginia. The staffs backgrounds in bibliography, undergraduate teaching, librarianship, textual editing, Special Collections, and graduate research reflects and supports the research and pedagogical needs of our patrons.(3) Indeed, the Etext Center has over the years become an incubator for students who have gone on to make careers for themselves in humanities computing even as the discipline invents itself we have alumni at the Library of Congress,

Technology and the contemporary library

Insights the UKSG journal, 2015

There are many challenges provided by contemporary higher education (HE) that impact all aspects and services provided. This article considers some of the challenges and developments in HE that might be reflected in, and impact upon, the library service. New challenges have been created by developments in technology. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have shone a spotlight onto the university, leading it to open up access to content and resources. The buildings that maintain very traditional ideologies are evolving, as are the services they provide. As today's students meander through their university life, we seek to understand them and their motives in greater detail. The author discusses these issues and focuses on people, on technology and on partnership.

Experiences of the Library in the Digital Age

2006

Abstract Libraries as physical structures embody the cultures within which they are situated and provide access to archive materials that represent the evolution of culture over time. Digital libraries serve similar roles to traditional ones in capturing and making available the written cultural heritage. However, the experience of interacting with materials in the digital library is very different to that in the traditional one. Access is democratised, but may be impoverished in other ways.

Inspiration, information: Libraries and Society in an age of change

The aim of this thesis paper is to understand the change in the relationship between libraries and society as part of the effects of today’s changes in technology, to analyze how this change is a reflection of how the very structure of information is being altered by the ways it is conveyed through digital platforms, and to trace its social impact. We are a culture of the book, the way we perceive and interact with the world has been shaped by the implications of print culture, and now this way is being transformed by the implications of digital culture. The different properties attributed to digital technologies enable people to have a more active and significant role in the construction of knowledge in culture.

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