Robbins Library Notes

Clearly something important and fundamental is happening to books and reading. Libraries need to be part of this reading revolution, supporting and defending the rights of digital readers, experimenting with new reader services, collecting new genres and media formats, and providing access for all readers to the devices, networks, content, and online communities that will continue to emerge.

Tom Peters — Library Journal, 11/1/2009

Good morning, readers!

Three weeks ago, I wrote about an editorial/advertisement for the vook that appeared in The Crimson.  This week, I want to follow up with a recent article by Tom Peters from Libraryjournal.com, titled “The Future of Reading.”  Peters talks about the crisis facing reading now — will reading and literacy decline and become the province of historical reenactors?  Or will it morph and change as new technologies emerge?  Or will it remain as one, but not the only, way of interacting with a text?

Again, I don’t think we need to adopt an either/or mentality.  A plurality of ways of reading and interacting with texts, both traditional and new, should be able to co-exist peacefully and learn from each other.  I’m actually very intrigued by and excited about these new forms of reading, even while I remain a practitioner of the more traditional form of reading.

What are  your thoughts, readers?

Administrative note: With next week being the Thanksgiving holiday break, I will not be posting then.  Posts will resume on 4 December.  See you then!

Good morning, readers!

I came across this piece, “Blind Spots: Humanists must plan their digital future,” by Johanna Drucker, in the latest issue of Library News & Notes. I’m including this piece today, to provoke some thought on how the library of the future for the humanities would look like.

Drucker starts out by discussing how Stanford University is in the process of building a new library for its engineering collection, and how the original proposal for the facility met with strong opposition from the engineering faculty. A new design, based on more realistic expectations and continuity of digital and print media, arose out of collaboration by faculty and library professionals.

Drucker likewise sees collaboration between humanities faculty and library professionals as being critical for future endeavors for humanities research and collections:

The task of modeling an environment for scholarship (not just individual projects, but an environment, with a suite of tools for access, use, and research activity) is not a responsibility that can be offloaded onto libraries or technical staffs. I cannot say this strongly or clearly enough: The design of digital tools for scholarship is an intellectual responsibility, not a technical task. After all, what will such “research portals” do? What kinds of work will they be designed to support? Editing? Annotation? Aggregation of leaves of manuscripts scattered at remote institutions? Collaborative writing? Close readings? Data mining? Information display? Multimedia writing? Networked conversation? Publishing? Those are enormous questions, to which no scholar would have the same set of answers as another. No scholar would have the same requirements. But creating boutique, custom solutions on a project-by-project basis is not practical, and the labor involved is too costly. The scope of the task ahead is nothing short of modeling scholarly activity anew in digital media. To answer that challenge, humanists have to do more than wave their hands at the technical professionals.

In fact, she argues, humanities scholars need to step up and be active participants in shaping the library and digital environments to best fit their research needs:

Many humanities principles developed in hard-fought critical battles of the last decades are absent in the design of digital contexts. Here is a short list: the subjectivity of interpretation, theoretical conceptions of texts as events (not things), cross-cultural perspectives that reveal the ideological workings of power, recognition of the fundamentally social nature of knowledge production, an intersubjective, mediated model of knowledge as something constituted, not just transmitted. For too long, the digital humanities, the advanced research arm of humanistic scholarly dialogue with computational methods, has taken its rules and cues from digital exigencies.

If we are interested in creating in our work with digital technologies the subjective, inflected, and annotated processes central to humanistic inquiry, we must be committed to designing the digital systems and tools for our future work. Nothing less than the way we understand knowledge and our tasks as scholars are at stake. Software and hardware only put into effect the models structured into their design.

Moreover, university administrators need to see such work as more valuable than they have to date. Faculty members and graduate students committed to remodeling knowledge with innovative approaches to scholarship have to be supported. With rare exceptions, the work, too easily seen as tool-building, has occurred at the edges of digital projects and is usually financed with grants. That does not result in approaches that can be generalized beyond specific projects.

Unless scholars in the humanities help design and model the environments in which they will work, they will not be able to use them. Tools developed for PlayStation and PowerPoint, Word, and Excel will be as appropriate to our intellectual labors as a Playskool workbench is to the chores of a real plumber. I once bought a very beautiful portable Olivetti typewriter because an artist friend of mine said it was so elegantly designed that it had been immediately put into the Museum of Modern Art collection. The problem? It wasn’t designed for typing. Any keyboardist with any skill at all constantly clogged its keys. A thing of beauty, it was a pain forever. I finally threw it from the fourth-floor tower of Wurster Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. Try doing that with the interface to your university library. Now reflect on who is responsible for getting it to work as an environment that supports scholarship.

We face a critical juncture. Leaving it to “them” is unfair, wrongheaded, and irresponsible. Them is us.

What do you think, readers, of Drucker’s argument? What do you think a future library for the humanities should look like? What sort of digital formats, media, etc. do you envision? How can print be integrated into this?

Good morning, readers!

I found this interesting article on print-on-demand publishing yesterday, and offer it for your reading pleasure this morning.

Why?  Well, for one thing, it’s my belief that print-on-demand publishing will be the direction in which book publishing moves in the future.  It is more economical, for one thing.  For another, it is more environmentally friendly: books are only printed when purchased, rather than having huge runs of copies printed, as they are now.  For a third, it is more democratic, allowing more people to publish their work, rather than having publishers rely on a small stable of highly-profitable authors.  Finally, books will be able to remain in-print for longer periods of time, since publishers will not have to keep inventory on hand.

Naturally, there are drawbacks, such as the potential for lack of editorial review for manuscripts.  Also, there will likely be an increase in vanity publishing.  Another potential problem is how to link these works to e-book readers like the Kindle, with its closed architecture platform?

Still, I don’t think that these drawbacks are insurmountable.

What do you think, readers?

Good morning, readers, and happy Friday!

I’m going to continue to look at Amazon’s Kindle today, with an article I found in “American Libraries Direct”: Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book: Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle’s lead will become a very short story.

Tim O’Reilly looks at why Amazon’s decision to use a proprietary, closed architecture may hurt the early success of the Kindle in the long run.

Good morning, readers, and happy Friday to you!

I found this wonderful post yesterday, via “American Libraries Direct” — “Giz Explains: Why There Isn’t a Perfect E-Book Reader.”  It’s a great look at the current state of e-book readers and their technology, and avoids a lot of the polemics and hype around e-book readers that’s been floating around lately with the launch of the Kindle 2.

Good morning, readers! Welcome back!

Via Bookforum.com: some interesting commentary on Robert Darnton’s piece on Google about which I recently posted.

I’m also curious to know what people think about Amazon’s second-generation Kindle e-book reader. I agree that e-books will change and re-shape the way we read — not necessarily a bad thing — but I’m still not sold on the idea that they will supplant paper books entirely.

What do you think?

Why the death of the hard-copy book and the inevitable triumph of e-books are both greatly exaggerated.

Good morning, readers!

Many of you are likely aware of, and perhaps are (heavy) users of, Google Book Search.  For those who don’t know, Google Book Search allows users to search for full-text, scanned copies of millions of books, many of which are out-of-print or hard to find.

However, Google Book Search has not been without controversy.  Some of the books which have been scanned into the database are still in copyright.  This hasn’t made the publishing industry or authors happy, because they view Google Book Search as a violation of copyright, which means no revenue from royalties and such that authors and publishers are owed.  Google, on the other hand, saw their scanning project as falling under the “fair use” clause of copyright.

Needless to say, the upshot of this led to a lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild against Google.  Two days ago, after a few years of negotiations, the Authors Guild and Google reached a deal.*  All sides have come to an agreement that allows Google Book Search to continue while paying authors and publishers (back) royalties for their work.

Why is this important to philosophical research?  Well, from what I’m reading, it looks like the deal will benefit all the interested parties — Google will be able to keep the books it has scanned in the database, and continue to add even more books to its database, which means that more texts become available to researchers.  It also means that publishers and authors will get paid what they’re due, and which may make them more amenable to contributing to the database.

Additionally, beyond the mere pragmatic aspects of the settlement, it also raises some interesting questions about the nature of texts, and our interactions with texts, something touched on in a slightly different context by Peter Brantley, in “Homes for Good (Orphan) Books.”

How do we, as philosophers, engage with and access philosophical texts in pedagogy, writing, and research?  There are some interesting and as yet barely discussed questions around these issues.

Thoughts, readers?

Update 11/03/2008: There has been some additional discussion on Peter Brantley’s blog, which is worth reading.

*A hat-tip to the family member who forwarded this on to me.

Good morning, readers, and welcome back on this Monday morning!

There has been a lot of press about the downsides of emerging technology, e.g., “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“  and The Googlization of Everything. (As you can see, a lot of this press is directed against Google, though not entirely.)

However, could there be an upside to this technology?  Damon Darlin thinks so, in “Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down.  It Frees Our Minds.”

What do you think, readers?  Granted that changes are occurring, some for the better, and some for the worse, what are you thoughts on this?

A hat-tip to the Rowland Institute’s Library News & Notes for this link.

I was sent this link to a short piece of fiction, “Engineers’ Dreams,” which is a fascinating look at Google, artificial intelligence, and concepts like the Turing machine.  It really makes you think about Google and search engines, among other things, in a whole new light.

I include it on this blog because it is much in the same vein as using Batman and other pop culture figures to discuss philosophy and philosophical questions.

What do you think, readers?