Of Books and Bytes: Electronic Texts at the University of Virginia Rare Book School. (1995) (original) (raw)
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Books are first of all material objects and concrete manifestation -as well as silent witnesses- of the material culture that created them. Books are certainly used as writing supports (be the text be handwritten or printed), however, as material objects, books are constituted by their material components, and the ways in which these are interconnected and mutually complete each other. Since the second half of the last century, the materiality of books has been the object of study of codicology and the archaeology of the book; this has generated a rich literature and numerous research endeavours, with an increasingly keener eye for all the information that artefacts can communicate with their materiality. Nowadays, an increasingly large number of libraries, archives, museums, private and cultural institutions is investing considerable amounts of money and resources in the digitization of our written cultural heritage. Such digitization projects, however, are focussed on the text. Some projects include photographs of covers and spines, which, somehow, transfer to the digital medium information regarding the physicity of books, and from which one may draw some conclusions regarding the materiality of the objects. Such pieces of information are however insufficient to gain a precise idea of the objects, and, most importantly, are not searchable within databases. Nevertheless, recently, it has been possible to observe the onset of a new trend, with research endeavours and projects designed to ‘digitalize’ the book as an object. This paper aims at introducing these new research activities and considers, looking at the near future, if and how the book as an object is finally entering the digital world, and what consequences this shift may bring forth.
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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
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Today reading has successfully made the transition from paper to the dynamic medium of the computer screen and is becoming a common experience in the world of electronic media. And while the computer industry does everything to convince us that "multi"media will be the glorious future of electronic communication we convey most of our concepts by writing and reading, be it on the computer, be it on paper. The electronic book as a platform to read on a dynamic medium is still in a very early stage both in software and hardware and may look dramatically different from what we expect it to be at this stage. Still the book is the primary source for text and thus a container of memory. This paper looks into the quality of private memory and its impact on our dealing with electronic media.
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