Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There was a story in yesterday’s New York Times about how most literary archives, including much of the Library of Congress, are not being digitized, and so important historical works of literature will either be lost or else will remain on view for only a very small group of people who are able to see them in person. For instance, the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, has a treasure-trove of John Steinbeck-related material available to scholars, but only to those who can travel to northern California and make an appointment for one of the three days of the week there’s an archivist at the center. “The center takes great care to preserve these relics of Steinbeck, a Nobel laureate,” says the NY Times, “yet it has no plans to take the collection a step further, to adapt to a digital age.” This is a shame. Imagine the kind of interaction scholars from around the world could have to these important papers if the archives were digital; they could be accessed 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Because of this, Steinbeck’s reputation (not to mention his pool of readers, and thus the sales of his books) would grow dramatically. However, as the Times piece points out, “These Steinbeck artifacts are not the only important pieces of history that are at risk of disappearing or being ignored in the digital age. As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes.” So while the “print is dead” debate usually revolves around new books appearing in a digital format, an argument could also (and should also) be made for preserving and making accessible archival print material in an electronic form. If not, then this material will both deteriorate and go unseen.

From the story: “To be sure, digitization efforts over the last 10 years have been ambitious and far-reaching. For many institutions, putting collections online, for both preservation and accessibility, is a priority. Yet for every letter from Abraham Lincoln to William Seward that can be found online, millions of documents bearing fine-grained witness to the Civil War will never be digitized. And for every CD re-release of Bessie Smith singing ‘Gimme a Pigfoot,’ the work of hundreds of lesser-known musicians from the early 20th century are unlikely to be converted to digital form. Money, technology and copyright complications are huge impediments.”

NY Times: History, Digitized (and Abridged)