Great little article by Anthony Grafton, recounting the history of reading, publishing and organizing books, ending with Google and other smaller efforts to digitize books. Conclusion:
Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But 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.
I am quite enjoying my Readers’ Advisory class this year. The professor, Juris Dilevko, author of the contrarian Readers’ Advisory Service in North American Public Libraries, 1870-2005: A History and Critical Analysis, is setting up the class as a debate between the previous (pre-1980) conception of Readers’ Advisory as the suggestion of “good” books and the promotion of education, and the current idea of “Give’um What They Want” and the promotion of Genre Fiction, promoted by the huge Genreflecting series of books, as well as Saricks’ Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library.
Dilevko has gone through the history of publishing and the current state of the publishing industry, dominated by huge media conglomerates and excessive advertising and cross-promotion. Opposed to this is a selection of books weighed by time, evaluated through numerous reviews and analysed by literary experts. For the corporations, it does not matter that the books are “good”, but only that they are read (or that they win one of the hundreds of book-awards that now exists). Risky artistic books are slowly becoming a rarity.
The question the class continually reaches is this: either of these positions is inauthentic. Why is it any better that one group of people tell us what to read over another group. The choice he presents, and I think it is a great conclusions, is this: it is true that someone is going to tell you what to read. Would we rather give that power to a corporate process which cares only of the bottom line, or to the evaluation of history? Would we rather be marketed to, or would we rather take a wait-and-see approach to what books will be considered worth of recommendation.
As for the question of the “superiority” of supposing that we can educate people, Dilevko quoted Reading Lolita in Tehran to the effect of saying, why do those better off think that those worse off do not want to read good books? Is this not more discriminatory, thinking that everyday people will not or cannot read classics?
Great little article by Anthony Grafton, recounting the history of reading, publishing and organizing books, ending with Google and other smaller efforts to digitize books. Conclusion:
