It's been an uphill battle convincing my big-picture, perfectionistic mind that each post here does not have to be a Grand Unified Theory of every thread currently running tangled and amok through my brain. We've reached a compromise: this is going to be part one of a series (if by series you were thinking non-linear, wibbly wobbley, series-y weries-y thing) orbiting around paper vs. e-books, library architecture, and off-site storage.
We discussed how old manuscripts are valued, not merely for the information they contain, nor simply for the novelty of their age, but also because of what we can learn from examining their physical construction and condition. The Right Reverend Dr. R. David Lankes told us the fascinating story of a researcher sniffing for the scent of vinegar on medieval letters to track the spread of bubonic plague in Europe. Since no merchant was keen to scare away trade by admitting an outbreak in their village, they'd write normal, "Everything's great over here!" letters, but would dunk them in vinegar to disinfect prior to sending. Not exactly the sort of thing you can capture in a scanned and digitized copy.
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The awesome Dr. Ken Lavender shows off a medieval medical book outlining the many uses of unicorn horns. |
Our 511 Intro to Librarianship & Info Science class (for which I am writing this blog) visited the special collections at Bird Library several weeks ago and saw quite a few fabulous old books/manuscripts/ cuneiform tablets/papyri, etc.
(Can I just interject that I HATE the word "tome"? I feel like it's a thesaurus-y word that not-so-great authors turn to when they're describing a book and want to spice things up, and dust off their tenth grade vocabulary skills. Congratulations. Petty, I know, but that's what pet peeves are.)
Here are some of the pics I took during our visit. (Let me just add, BTW, that I was SHOCKED by the fact that no one wore gloves while handling these. Isn't that, like, Document Preservation 101, Lesson 1: "Your hands have oils on them! Look, don't touch!"?).
Italian betrothal book (1500's?) with still-vibrant colors made from
crushed lapis lazuli and other gemstones.
Loved the illustrations in this bitchin' Italian devotional
(14th century, I think?)
We discussed how old manuscripts are valued, not merely for the information they contain, nor simply for the novelty of their age, but also because of what we can learn from examining their physical construction and condition. The Right Reverend Dr. R. David Lankes told us the fascinating story of a researcher sniffing for the scent of vinegar on medieval letters to track the spread of bubonic plague in Europe. Since no merchant was keen to scare away trade by admitting an outbreak in their village, they'd write normal, "Everything's great over here!" letters, but would dunk them in vinegar to disinfect prior to sending. Not exactly the sort of thing you can capture in a scanned and digitized copy.
But let me get to my first thought in the debate about digitization, off-site storage, and the glory of physical copies of books: Generally speaking, those special collections-y books are not cheap pulp generated quickly and en masse to be consumed and fall apart shortly thereafter like a mass market paperback of the latest true crime novel, or trashy romance. Many of them are treasures that took incredible amounts of time, and work to create, or are truly one-of-a-kind documents that give us insight into history.
Like this book, which belonged to Queen Elizabeth I
Writing in the flyleaf of QEI's book. We aren't sure whose
handwriting it is. The Queen herself? An advisor?
I feel like digitization opponents often react as though someone is suggesting that we scan old, historical texts to Google Books, and then have an ol' fashioned book-burning party afterwards. Or that some black-suited “They” will come and forcibly snatch the sentimental, leather-bound Jane Eyre Grandma gave them, stomp on it, and shove an e-reader into their hands instead. Maybe that's a straw man, but neither really seems probable. People aren’t going to stop liking books, just because it’s possible to get the information they’ve contained up until now elsewhere. If I know anything about American, individualist, consumerist culture, it's that we are insane hoarders (often of completely worthless items, and I wouldn't consider books useless--especially considering the junk people are piling to the rafters these days).
This debate is complicated for plenty of reasons. It’s about history, and emotion, and all kinds of intangible things. It’s about physical, and electronic space; paper (an increasingly less-renewable resource); access to information (who has it? to what extent? is it equally available to all, regardless of race, gender, citizenship, socio-economic status, etc?). So there are personal, architectural, environmental, and social implications in this not-so-black-and-white discussion.
As a future school librarian and huge literacy proponent, access is the most important element of this debate for me. How much more knowledge could be created, for example, if ancient manuscripts that have been gathering dust locked in archives for decades awaiting scholarly attention, were scanned and made available to scholars around the world?
My husband is currently working on his PhD at the University of Chicago studying Near Eastern Language and Civilization. When he began his program this fall, he got to take a behind-the-scenes tour of The Oriental Institute there (one of my new favorite places). He texted me the following pic of a classmate standing next to a mummy laying on a piece of styrofoam on a storage shelf in the basement. Apparently (like many museums of its kind), the OI is so full of archeological finds dug up and dusted off by students over the past hundred years that there's quite a backlog. So far back, that there are wooden crates shipped from digs in the 1930's that still remain unopened. What you see in the exhibits upstairs is barely even the tip of the iceberg. The average person doesn’t have access to that material (also standard for museums for some obvious reasons).
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What's the Dewey Decimal classification # for mummies? |
I could, at this point, bring this post back around to special collections at Bird Library, to ask how many students even know what is up there, let alone have access to it? And to ponder the significance or insignificance of that. Or discuss the balance between preserving something for its own sake, or preserving it for use/analysis. Conservation and preservation are fascinating, but I'm not going to explore them right now.
Rather, I'm going to proceed (quite logically, as you'll see) to the apocalyptic film The Day After Tomorrow. I'm sure you're following my train of thought. Just think: mummies-->some examples of which were Incan-->a pre-European American people group like the Maya-->who were generators of the “2012” prophecy-->regarding the apocalypse-->about which the film The Day After Tomorrow also revolves. Six steps!
Still with me? Good. In fact, if you've stuck with me this far, here's your opportunity to be rewarded. The first person to email me and say, "I read your f@#%ing long blog post" will get a $5 Starbucks gift card. For reals.
Tobogganing in the NY Public Library brought to you
by 20th Century Fox
Anyway, in the movie, a group of students have taken shelter in the New York Public Library while a massive, catastrophic shift in climate is causing the city to flood and then freeze rapidly. Huddled together in a reading room with a giant fireplace, they engage in a heated debate (yup, pun intended) with a librarian regarding the ethics of burning books to keep warm (inexplicably, no one suggests burning the heavy wooden furniture surrounding them, but I digress). This leads to the following conversation between two characters walking through the stacks to gather fuel for the fire:
Jeremy: Friedrich Nietzsche? We cannot burn Friedrich Nietzsche! He was the most important thinker of the 19th century!
Elsa: Oh, please! Nietzsche was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister.
Jeremy: He was not a chauvinist pig!
Elsa: But he was in love with his sister.
Brian: Uh, excuse me, you guys? Yeah. There's a whole section on tax law down here that we can burn.
Brian, THANK YOU. I would like to pronounce you winner of The Voice of Reason Award. Books are not sacred by nature of their codex format. What are sacred are the ideas they carry, and the freedom of expression they represent; how they help us turn information into knowledge, and ignorance into understanding and empathy. Those words aren't bound by pulped paper (well, they sort of are, but let me wax metaphorical here), and can be transmitted plenty of other ways. For some eye-opening information on the lifespan of different media, see Alison's awesome post on Permanence.
I'm not trying to say that this debate doesn't matter, or that it has an easy solution, so we should stop worrying about it. It's just that there's a whole lot of "tax law" (along with a bazillion different editions of Nietzsche's work) that has been and continues to be cranked out for public consumption that simply isn't archival material worth preserving for several hundred years, nor should we feel obligated to worship it as such. Not that I'm a proponent of book burning, or think it's wise for librarians to be the sole arbiters of what is worthwhile. I just don't think we're doing posterity some major disservice by deciding to digitally reformat, or stop printing so many of them (or "re-home" or"humanely destroy" those that are no longer being circulated).
If I've learned anything from #daveheart this semester, it's that librarians are not booksellers, nor are our livelihoods inextricably linked to the continued perpetuation of the "book" paradigm as we have known it thus far. We're here to provide information access to the public, in whatever format allows for the most access for the greatest number. The future of libraries appears to depend much more on whether they can evolve to meet the needs and expressed desires of the communities they serve. Whether, like Eli Neiburger of the Ann Arbor District Library, you think libraries should get back to facilitating the creation, storage, and preservation of community-generated content as a way to survive; or whether you think our only hope is in becoming full-on community centers, complete with yoga classes and circulating pets, it isn't an either/or. Each library and community will determine the both/and of the situation based on what they feel they want and need. If done well, THAT is what will continue making libraries and librarians relevant and vital to our communities into the future.
