Alessandro Ludovico: The liquid library
Traditional libraries are increasingly putting their holdings online, if not in competition with Google Books then in partnership, in order to keep pace with the mass digitization of content. Yet it isn't only the big institutional actors that are driving this process forward: small-scale, independent initiatives based on open source principles offer interesting approaches to re-defining the role and meaning of the library
A deep conflict is brewing silently in libraries around the globe. Traditional librarians – skilled, efficient and acknowledged – are being threatened by bosses, themselves trying to cope with substantial funding cuts, with the word "digital", touted as a panacea for saving space and money. At the same time, in other (less traditional) places, there is a massive digitalization of books underway aimed at establishing virtual libraries much bigger than any conventional one. These phenomena are questioning the library as point of reference and as public repository of knowledge. Not only is its bulky physicality being questioned, but the core idea that, after the advent of truly ubiquitous networks, we still need a central place to store, preserve, index, lend and share knowledge.
It is important not to forget that traditional libraries (public and private) still guarantee the preservation of and access to a huge number of digitally-unavailable texts, and that a book's material condition sometimes tells part of the story, not to mention the experience of reading it in a library. Still, it is evident that we are facing the biggest digitization ever attempted, in a process comparable to what Napster meant for music in the early 2000s. But this time there are many more "institutional" efforts running simultaneously, so that we are constantly hearing announcements that new historical material has been made accessible online by libraries and institutions of all sizes.
The biggest digitizers are Google Books (private) and Internet Archive (non-profit). The former is officially aiming to create a privately owned, "universal library", which in April 2013 claimed to contain 30 millions digitized books. The latter is an effort to make a comparably huge public library by using Creative Commons licenses and getting rid of Digital Rights Management chains, and currently claims to hold almost 5 millions digitized books.
These monumental efforts are struggling with one specific element: the time it takes to create digital content by converting it from another medium. This process, of course, creates accidents. Krissy Wilson's blog/artwork The Art of Google Books explores daily the non-digital elements (accidental or not) emerging in scanned pages, which can be purely material – such as scribbled notes, parts of the scanning person's hand, dried flowers – or typographical or linguistic, or deleted or missing parts, all of them precisely annotated. This small selection of illustrations of how physicality causes technology to fail may be self-reflective, but it shows a particular aspect of a larger development. In fact, industrial scanning is only one side of the coin. The other is the private and personal digitization and sharing of books.
On the basis of brilliant open source tools like the DIY Bookscanner, there are various technical and conceptual efforts to building specialist digital libraries. Monoskop is exemplary: its creator Dusan Barok has transformed his impressive personal collection of media (about contemporary art, culture and politics, with a special focus on eastern Europe) into a common resource, freely downloadable and regularly updated... read more:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-08-26-ludovico-en.html
A deep conflict is brewing silently in libraries around the globe. Traditional librarians – skilled, efficient and acknowledged – are being threatened by bosses, themselves trying to cope with substantial funding cuts, with the word "digital", touted as a panacea for saving space and money. At the same time, in other (less traditional) places, there is a massive digitalization of books underway aimed at establishing virtual libraries much bigger than any conventional one. These phenomena are questioning the library as point of reference and as public repository of knowledge. Not only is its bulky physicality being questioned, but the core idea that, after the advent of truly ubiquitous networks, we still need a central place to store, preserve, index, lend and share knowledge.
It is important not to forget that traditional libraries (public and private) still guarantee the preservation of and access to a huge number of digitally-unavailable texts, and that a book's material condition sometimes tells part of the story, not to mention the experience of reading it in a library. Still, it is evident that we are facing the biggest digitization ever attempted, in a process comparable to what Napster meant for music in the early 2000s. But this time there are many more "institutional" efforts running simultaneously, so that we are constantly hearing announcements that new historical material has been made accessible online by libraries and institutions of all sizes.
The biggest digitizers are Google Books (private) and Internet Archive (non-profit). The former is officially aiming to create a privately owned, "universal library", which in April 2013 claimed to contain 30 millions digitized books. The latter is an effort to make a comparably huge public library by using Creative Commons licenses and getting rid of Digital Rights Management chains, and currently claims to hold almost 5 millions digitized books.
These monumental efforts are struggling with one specific element: the time it takes to create digital content by converting it from another medium. This process, of course, creates accidents. Krissy Wilson's blog/artwork The Art of Google Books explores daily the non-digital elements (accidental or not) emerging in scanned pages, which can be purely material – such as scribbled notes, parts of the scanning person's hand, dried flowers – or typographical or linguistic, or deleted or missing parts, all of them precisely annotated. This small selection of illustrations of how physicality causes technology to fail may be self-reflective, but it shows a particular aspect of a larger development. In fact, industrial scanning is only one side of the coin. The other is the private and personal digitization and sharing of books.
On the basis of brilliant open source tools like the DIY Bookscanner, there are various technical and conceptual efforts to building specialist digital libraries. Monoskop is exemplary: its creator Dusan Barok has transformed his impressive personal collection of media (about contemporary art, culture and politics, with a special focus on eastern Europe) into a common resource, freely downloadable and regularly updated... read more:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-08-26-ludovico-en.html
