Reading Room(s): Virtual Spaces
and Physical Places in the
Building of Digital Libraries
Elizabeth Losh
University of California, Irvine
Initial Questions
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Is there a "right to read" that the advent
of digital texts both asserts and
subverts?
How is the mission of rare books
libraries in the custody of government
agencies different from that of libraries
begun by universities or by wealthy
private philanthropists?
If there are coherent national policies
to create virtual libraries, how do
citizens participate in decision-making
about those policies?
How are digital resources distributed
when there are multiple publics, both
local and national?
Copies and Originals
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Praises for conventional texts
with conventional freedoms
from Warner, Stallman, and
Samuelson
Walter Benjamin and the
“aura” of the original
Arthur Miller in the archive –
the need to occupy particular
physical spaces for reading
Hillel Schwartz and the culture
of the copy
The Gutenberg Bible in three
national libraries as an
“original copy”
Copies and originals in the trial
transcripts in Salem
The Bibliothèque nationale de France
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William Mitchell and the limits
of architectural metaphors
Millennialism and national
ambitions
Planned obsolescence for a
library without readers
Stanley Chodorow and the end
of the “era of great libraries”
Building on previous analog
replication techniques: the
microfilm collection
Vulnerable but copyrighted
texts from after 1850
Prioritizing and categorizing
periodicals
The Bibliothèque nationale de France
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Surveillance and the
disjunction between
cyberspace and real
space
Reinscribing hierarchy:
two levels for two types of
readers
The heritage of restrictive
copyright
The British Library
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Ideology of national
difference
The Paris Opera, the Old
BNF, and the English Free
School.
Nostalgia for the old round
reading room and the
literature of encounter and
public reading
Predicting readership:
substitution vs. synergy
The British Library
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The Burney Collection
Economic issues: the limits to
Lottery money and the appeal
of partnerships outside Britain
Policy issues and the need for
context
Database constraints on
identifiability and use
Trade-offs that work against
searchable text initiatives
“Turning the Pages”
Historical importance of
photographic reproduction:
Edward Augustus Bond
Orientation and the theme of a
“national sense of place”
The Library of Congress
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The Jefferson Building’s
centenary
Gender and allegory: men’s
names and women’s bodies
Narratives of epistemology
in the murals
The reading room as
simulacrum
Democratic institutions and
public space
The Library of Congress
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The American Memory project
Presidential collections and
presidential replicators
“Open source” users and the impact
on taxonomy
Corporate sponsors
The example of the missing
McCarthy period: who will fund it?
Other models: FBI files and the
Freedom of Information Act and the
National Archives and NAIL
The end of the five-year plan
Archiving digital ephemera: another
impact of September 11th
The Salem Witchcraft Archive
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Multiple publics
Citizenship and access
Librarians as local officials
Context and local history
The epistemology of place
Arthur Miller’s replications
Transcription and
interpretation
Towards a Conclusion
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Christine Borgman and the
contradictions inherent in a “digital
library”
Do digital libraries substitute content or
services?
Facsimiles vs. text-encoding
Synergistic rather than substitutive
planning
Reading and citizenship: the archives
and public reading
The implications of political ideologies of
capitalism and intellectual property
Two-way exchanges that anticipate
“open source” users
Ethnographic work with Jennifer Cool