A painless introduction to ...
Paper in the brave
new digital world:
why we still need the
physical book and what
digital research adds to its
history
Anne Welsh
Lecturer in Library & Information Studies
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MA LIS / MA ARM / MA Digital Humanities
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/teaching/modules/instg012/
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“Bibliography is the discipline that
studies texts as recorded forms, and
the processes of their transmission,
including their production and
reception.”
~ D.F. McKenzie
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Types of Bibliography
• Enumerative bibliography
– Listing books by topic, date, type or author
• Historical bibliography
– Primarily the physical processes of book production
• Analytical bibliography
– Identifying differences and the “ideal copy”
• Descriptive bibliography
– Describing all the evidence about the book
• Textual bibliography
– The text in relation to its transmission processes
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The life of books
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The bibliographer’s province
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Communications Circuit
Author
Readers:
Purchasers
Borrowers
Clubs
Libraries
Intellectual
influences
& publicity
Booksellers:
Wholesellers
Retailers
Peddlers
Binders, etc.
Publisher
Economic
& social
conjuncture
Political
& legal
sanctions
Shippers:
Agents
Smugglers
Entrepot Keeper
Waggoner, etc.
Suppliers:
Paper
Ink
Type
Labour
Printers:
Compositors
Pressmen
Warehousemen
After Darnton
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Books at the forefront of technology
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Recording watermarks
From: http://watermark.kb.nl/
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Electron radiography of watermarks
From: http://watermark.kb.nl/
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Online searchable watermark databases
From: http://watermark.kb.nl/
Also: http://www.wm-portal.net/niki/index.php
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Other innovations
• Digitised collections
• from jpeg to pdf to fully-browsable
• Online catalogues
• from card / paper to online (MARC)
• from surrogate to full-text
• from format-specific to institution-wide
• from institutional to national to international
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Technology in the Brave New World
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Homogenisation?
‘There is nothing wrong in the whole wide world’ by Chris Cobb, 2005
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As it’s Burns Night ...
http://itunes.apple.com/
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Versioning in the digital collection
http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/cmsw/burns/
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“Extreme Versioning”
But is it the quantity or the
quality of error that really
matters?
Borel’s singes dactylographes
more likely to produce millions of
errors than text of the quality of
Shakespeare ...
Barker & Lucas, “Wicked Bible”
1631
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More typical versioning
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Store them? Preserve them? How?
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Digital versus print?
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Readers
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Readers
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=159
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Picture credits
Some of the pictures in these slides are copyright commons, some rights reserved:
vince42, http://www.flickr.com/photos/84609865@N00/3714671728/
posixeleni, http://www.flickr.com/photos/posixeleni/3563513903/
Kaotiqua, http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaotiqua/131701845/
Diorama Sky, http://www.flickr.com/photos/diorama_sky/2975796332/
Librarian in Black, http://www.flickr.com/photos/librarianinblack/1392970571/
Elizabeth Beers, http://www.flickr.com/photos/brixton/150605829/
Topsy Qur’et, http://www.flickr.com/photos/topsy/204929063/
goXuno Reviews, http://www.flickr.com/photos/43602175@N06/4070018828/