Re: Economics of dead tree (was: Re: A Radical Thesis)

Buford C. Terrell wrote:
>
> But most of what is published on paper is also ephemeral. Libraries,
> serving as archivists, have been independent of publishers at least
> since the press moved book publishing out of the monastic scriptoria.

Just to nitpick: by the time the printing press was introduced, i.e. mid-15th century, most manuscript books had been produced for at least two hundred years by commercial, non-monastic scribes.

> Some of the libraries are beginning to take seriously their roles
> as electronic archivists as well, but I'm not sure that archiving is,
> or should be, any direct concern of the publisher as publisher.

One should keep in mind that a library is not necessarily an archive. Some libraries contain archives of particular subjects, others libraries do not or cannot attempt this. As a librarian, I shudder at the thought of being an "electronic archivist" and am glad to be working mainly with nicely tangible rare books and manuscripts. The task of dealing with electronic materials in the same manner that librarians have dealt with printed works -- survey, selection based on judgement as to current and future value, collection, storage, cataloging and indexing -- is incredibly enormous, even impossibly so given the rate of growth of electronic materials and the concurrent shrinking of library staffs and funding. It was suggested in another post that the Library of Congress become the archive for such materials; but with LC's present cataloging backlog of millions of books, I can't see how they could take on this role, unless taxpayers were to fund a new and fairly large division.

Wayne Hammond
Chapin Library, Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts
Wayne.G.Hammond[_at_]williams.edu Received on Fri Apr 26 1996 - 17:56:04 GMT