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02 Apr 08

Onward and Upward with the Arts: Future Reading: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

www.newyorker.com/...071105fa_fact_grafton - Preview

bibliothèque_numérique book digital_collection digital_library google_books lecture mediology médiologie reading

Without leaving Manhattan, Kazin read his way into “lonely small towns, prairie villages, isolated colleges, dusty law offices, national magazines, and provincial ‘academies’ where no one suspected that the obedient-looking young reporters, law clerks, librarians, teachers would turn out to be Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore.”
It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press
The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.
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- s early as the third millennium B.C., Mesopotamian scribes began to catalogue the clay tablets in their collections. For ease of reference, they appended content descriptions to the edges of tablets, and they adopted systematic shelving for quick identification of related texts.
- Six hundred years later, Eusebius, a historian and bishop of the coastal city of Caesarea, in Palestine, assembled Christian writings in the local library. He also devised a system of cross-references, known as “canon tables,” that enabled readers to find parallel passages in the four Gospels—a system that the scholar James O’Donnell recently described as the world’s first set of hot links.
- With electronic publishing programs, libraries have begun to take on many of the tasks that traditionally fell to university presses, such as the distribution of doctoral dissertations and the reproduction of local book and document collections—a spread of activities that Eusebius would have found natural.
- Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s “Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings. Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices.
- the film- and reprint-based libraries never became really comprehensive. The commercial companies that did most of the filming naturally concentrated on more marketable texts, while nonprofit sponsors concentrated on the texts that mattered to them. No over-all logic determined which texts were reprinted on paper, which were filmed, and which remained in obscurity.
- It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,”
- The cataloguing data that identify an item are often incomplete or confusing. And the key terms that Google provides in order to characterize individual books are sometimes unintentionally comic. It’s not all that helpful, when you’re thinking about how to use an 1878 Baedeker guide to Paris, to be told that one of its keywords is “fauteuils.”
- If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million
- The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating.
- Specialist engines like Google Scholar can discriminate with astonishing precision between relevant and irrelevant, firsthand and derivative information.
- And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks.
- these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.
- For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come.

25 Nov 07

Portail européen Michael : Découvrez le patrimoine culturel numérique européen

www.michael-culture.org/home - Preview

digital_collection digital_library europe michael portal

Grâce au service multilingue MICHAEL vous avez la possibilité d'explorer les collections numériques des musées, services d'archives, bibliothèques et autres institutions culturelles d'Italie, de France et du Royaume-Uni. Que vous soyez amateur d'art, d'archéologie, de généalogie, ou bien intéressé par l'histoire romaine ou moderne ou encore par des projets de vacances, MICHAEL peut vous aider à trouver les ressources accessibles.

Patrimoine numérique. Catalogue des collections numérisées

www.numerique.culture.fr/...index.html - Preview

bibliothèque_numérique culture digital_collection digital_library france

Le catalogue en ligne du patrimoine culturel numérisé décrit les collections numérisées et les productions
multimédia associées (site internet, dévédérom, cédérom...). Il recense les institutions à l'origine de projets
de numérisation en France. Vous êtes intéressé par le Moyen Age ou le XXe siècle, un état civil pour construire
votre arbre généalogique ou le patrimoine de votre région, le catalogue peut vous aider à chercher,
vous indiquer où trouver.

Le catalogue est le volet national du projet européen Michael.

Welcome to GTP - Global Text

globaltext.org - Preview

digital_collection literacy solidarité textbooks

The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a Web site. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. Thus, while the goal, educating the disadvantaged, is the same as that of the One Laptop per Child project, we are not tied to a particular device or medium.

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