An Unique Public, Private and Institutional Constuct - The Case of The London Library (original) (raw)
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Acquisitions Librarian , 2001
With the widespread advent of access to digital collections via schools, universities, public libraries, and home computers there sometimes comes a sense of a perceived dichotomy between ‘‘real’’ reading which involves the codex book, and ‘‘virtual’’ reading which takes place on a video display terminal. Reading, both basic literacy and recreational reading for experienced readers, is a significant aspect of librarians’ roles and of the public’s perception of the library’s role. Therefore, the act of reading and the role of reading in people’s lives is a topic that warrants study and reflection. McCook, Kathleen de la Peña, and Catherine Jasper. 2001. “The Meaning of Reading: Fiction and Public Libraries.” Acquisitions Librarian 13 (25): 51-60.
College & Research Libraries, 2001
Fold has been prompting passionate and par tisan debate among professionals and the public on the subject of preserving our documentary heritage. Perhaps now, with the passage of time, there can be a rea soned review of this book. Or perhaps not. For although the sub ject is serious and the debate necessary, the objective reviewer can only be struck with the unfair, one-sided nature of the author's arguments. Yet, to dismiss Baker and his work would be to follow the author's own policy-for he sees evil, stu pidity, incompetence, fraud, and con spiracy in nearly everyone who holds an opinion different from his. As such, the irony is immense: Baker sees the library world and its "assault on paper" similarly to the microfilm he detests so much. Al though he allows for some shades of gray, pretty much everything in his viewfinder is black or white. For years now, Baker asserts, librar ians, preservation administrators, and policymakers have been willfully de stroying our paper heritage, changing countless bound volumes (bound news papers are his special delight) into bad microfilm, and then throwing the origi nals away, or worse. Baker has a collector's (not a researcher's) reverence for old printed text; he cringes at the sight of bound volumes being guillotined and assumes that the librarians are as de lighted as the Paris mobs were during the reign of terror. The wonderful originals vanish, while in their place appear the changeling of bad microfilm-with pages skipped, many frames illegible, and the original format of the materials, contain
Reading the late-romantic circulating library (2010)
Reading the late-romantic circulating library. Authorship and the anxiety of anonymity in E.T.A. Hoffmanns late work. In: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (Special Issue: Romantic Cultures of Print. Hg. von Jonathan Sachs und Andrew Piper) 57–58 (2010).
Combining findings from the sociology of literature, the history of the book and reading, and studies on the materiality of the text, this paper reassesses a late-Romantic 'scene of reading' in E. T. A. Hoffmann's My Cousin's Corner Window (1822). This 'scene of reading' presents the lending library as one of the central institutions of Romanticism and depicts anonymity as a crucial mode of Romantic authorship. Furthermore, Hoffmann's 'scene of reading' focuses on the significant and problematic fact that literary communication is 'anonymized' by the uniform materiality of the bookbindings used in late-Romantic lending libraries and associated reading practices.
Modern Philology, 2016
There is a saying among scholar-librarians that goes something like this: all manuscripts are copies, and all printed books are unique. 1 In the past, such bibliographical witticism served to keep newcomers to the field of rare books and manuscripts on their toes. Today, such truths may not be selfevident. Manuscripts seem to promise greater research value because of their apparent uniqueness, and they continue to command high sale prices in the marketplace, even while the cost of many antiquarian books continues to fall. Curators of special collections, meanwhile, are increasingly asked to justify purchases of printed materials that may seem unnecessary, redundant, or even burdensome when electronic surrogates are readily available via digital libraries such as Google Books. Some commentators treat the discarding of physical books as a fait accompli: "What are we going to do with all that space that was once devoted to storage in the form of stacks?" 2 It is here that David McKitterick has much to teach us. Written as a companion to his Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (2003), Old Books, New Technologies explores what McKitterick calls the "myth of the uniformity of print" (42). We learn about the vexed historical role that printed books play as unique, physical artifacts that, more frequently than not, are presented as identical copies. Yet it is only by analyzing multiple wit-For permission to reuse, please contact
The Changing Library Scene: The Lament of an Old "Bookish" Soul
This article by a regular user of dffirent libraries but a non-LIS professional looks at tlrc emerging electronic communication in libraries from a subjectiae and impressionistic perspectiue nnd, argues in a halfserious-half-humorous aein that the electronic enuironment hns resulted in three kinds of losses: thc loss of self-importance (in the author's olun case)t; the loss of a sense of discoaery; and the loss of comfort and solih.tde.