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The Book-less Library: Coming Soon?
SES wrote:
EXCERPT: Posted on Mon, May. 16, 2005 Longhorns to check books out for good By Ralph Blumenthal NEW YORK TIMES HOUSTON - Students attending the University of Texas will find something missing from the undergraduate library this fall. Books. By mid-July, the university says, almost all of the library's 90,000 volumes will be dispersed to other university collections to clear space for a 24-hour electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country. More at: http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/...n/11658651.htm --- As much as I relish the convenience of e-text, there is something surpassingly sad about the absence of actual books in a library setting. I don't know if it is the tactile experience or just the fact that, with a book, you've got self-contained set of tools necessary to access the information it contains. No batteries required. How do you think this development will impact the publishing industry, book-sales, etc. in the near term? SES On the other hand, the University of Toronto just completed construction of a 600,000 volume Rare Book Library that even includes a cuneiform tablet. Maybe, they figure it is a good time to buy cheap from the University of Texas. Research on pre-printing press texts is not quite as simple as scanning the page or transcribing the text. First, the scanned page may not show erasures or changes in text as well as the original, and a transcribed text involves interpretation of characters that might be ambiguous. The Oxford editions of classical Greek and Latin texts attest to the difficulties of which I speak. Further, damaged texts have to be seen in person to determine the length of the line that should have been written to estimate the likely number of characters that are missing. Just take a look at the first few pages of Eco's "Baudolino" to see some of these issues presented. Texts printed post 1500 CE present fewer of these problems, though they are not problem free by any means. How many novels, for instance, contain changes between the first printing and the second printing. Then there are the kind of differences in text presented, say, by Melville's "Moby-Dick", where the first English publication contains a significant number of differences with respect to the first American edition. Both were fairly close in publication time. Which one is the preferred text has been the subject of much critical analysis. The library personnel in charge of scanning or copying the texts would have to know about this in order to make research possible. Another example is the book, known in the USA, as "Bob, Son of Battle". The English and American versions differ in both title and text. Electronic texts may or may not gloss over these important differences. It requires an acute scholar to take all of this into account. It is not to be expected that the 90,000 volumes got anything like this sort of treatment. Thus, by means of selection, inadvertent or otherwise, the University has limited the quality of research that can be done. Imagine Arturo Perez-Reverte's "The Club Dumas" if there were only e-texts around! Francis A. Miniter |
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On 2005-05-20, John A Stovall wrote:
They are not getting rid of the books. They are placing them in other libraries on campus. Besides Undergraduates are not scholars. The scholars at the UT Austin campus will continue to have the Ransom collection to work with as well as all the books which were in that building and the other world class collections there. Actually undergraduate libraries are generally something which became widespread in the 1970s or so among large universities--before that undergraduates used the general university library (humanities) and departmental branch libraries (sciences, art, music, law...). [Although the very largest universities such as Harvard had them for a long time] When tight budgets cames, frequently the universities quit adding stock to these undergraduate collections. With the switch to using electronic resources in the last few years, many of these universities have gotten rid of the undergraduate library (adding the existing stock to other university collections) and using the space for electronic resources. -- Jonathan Grobe Books Browse our inventory of thousands of used books at: http://www.grobebooks.com |
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on Fri, 20 May 2005 09:36:00 -0400, SES stated:
On Thu, 19 May 2005 21:54:17 -0400, "Francis A. Miniter" wrote: SES wrote: [A texas university converts undergrad library to all e-text] As much as I relish the convenience of e-text, there is something surpassingly sad about the absence of actual books in a library setting. I don't know if it is the tactile experience or just the fact that, with a book, you've got self-contained set of tools necessary to access the information it contains. No batteries required. How do you think this development will impact the publishing industry, book-sales, etc. in the near term? SES On the other hand, the University of Toronto just completed construction of a 600,000 volume Rare Book Library that even includes a cuneiform tablet. Maybe, they figure it is a good time to buy cheap from the University of Texas. *grin* [Very enlightening description of the difficulties of creating/obtaining/etc. very old books as e-text deleted] Thank you for this very enlightening (and encouraging) response. Perhaps our great-grandchildren won't be relegated to visiting museums in order to answer the question, "What's a book?" Consider, also, the actual process of reading. I spend a lot of my time on line, reading a lot of stuff. I'm also in the middle of writing a PhD dissertation, entailing yet more hours on the computer. I don't object in the least to that computer time. But I'll be damned if I'll read an entire novel on a computer screen. I print out the (relatively short) scientific articles I need for my dissertation, and read them as hardcopy; it's so much easier. But printing out an e-text of a novel? What on earth is the point, when you can buy a paperback copy for less than the cost of the printer ink? Search capacity is a great thing, and it will be nice to have computer access to texts that are otherwise too rare for most of us to ever see. But I suspect that there will need to be a major evolution in computers before the majority of the books that get read are in electronic format instead of nice, solid paper between classic covers. -Allison |
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Allison Turner- wrote:
on Fri, 20 May 2005 09:36:00 -0400, SES stated: snip Search capacity is a great thing, and it will be nice to have computer access to texts that are otherwise too rare for most of us to ever see. But I suspect that there will need to be a major evolution in computers before the majority of the books that get read are in electronic format instead of nice, solid paper between classic covers. -Allison Yes. Print is about 1600x1600 dpi in resolution. Monitors still have a ways to go. (I set mine at 1152 x 864 [only about 38% as sharp as a book], which drives most people who look at my monitor crazy.) Then there is the problem of taking the monitor to the bathroom to read! Francis A. Miniter |
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Jonathan Grobe writes:
On 2005-05-20, John A Stovall wrote: They are not getting rid of the books. They are placing them in other libraries on campus. Besides Undergraduates are not scholars. The scholars at the UT Austin campus will continue to have the Ransom collection to work with as well as all the books which were in that building and the other world class collections there. Actually undergraduate libraries are generally something which became widespread in the 1970s or so among large universities--before that undergraduates used the general university library (humanities) and departmental branch libraries (sciences, art, music, law...). [Although the very largest universities such as Harvard had them for a long time] When tight budgets cames, frequently the universities quit adding stock to these undergraduate collections. With the switch to using electronic resources in the last few years, many of these universities have gotten rid of the undergraduate library (adding the existing stock to other university collections) and using the space for electronic resources. I wasn't that fond of undergraduates having their own, baby library to play in anyway. Learning to use a large library is one of the things they should be learning in college. It shouldn't be dumbed down for them. -- Patrick |
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