I've been struggling with this question in various forms for three
decades. In my first position I was a media librarian. I inherited a
vast collection of fragile 78 rpm discs featuring, in many cases,
recordings that had not yet migrated to newer formats. If you wanted to
hear a recording of T.S. Eliot reading The Wasteland, this was the only
version available.
Around that time, I wrote the "Phonograph Records" chapter in an ALA
book entitled _Nonbook Media_. In the process I discovered the effects
of earlier transitions to newer formats. For instance, Enrico Caruso,
George Gershwin and Scott Joplin all died before the advent of amplified
recording. All of recordings of Caruso were made by having him sing as
loudly as he could into a megaphone attached to a cactus thorn
transcribing the sound onto a rotating wax disc. All subsequent copies
were made from a physical mold of the original disc. In the case of the
latter two artists, piano could not be rendered audibly in the
pre-amplified era and neither made an audio recording. Instead, both
left their legacies on player piano rolls. Ironically a number of
important audio recordings of their performances have been produced from
these.
Perhaps more importantly, I discovered what got left behind with each
transition to a new format. Production via 78 discs was within reach of
very small labels and there was a remarkable outburst of diverse
material recorded in that era. This was the heyday of "ethnic music"
including Yiddish recordings. The move to 33rpm and 45rpm discs saw a
consolidation and eventual monopoly in the music business. The smaller
markets represented by ethnic music, though large in the aggregate,
didn't provide the volume, record by record, that satisfied corporate
accountants or stockholders: the massive library of important recordings
was kicked to the curb. Luckily, a lot survived on fragile 78 discs
long enough to be rediscovered by ethnomusicologists and fans and
transferred in the digital age. Unfortunately, many important
recordings were lost.
I speculated in my chapter what would happen with the move to audio CD.
I saw rightly that legal permissions and other technical issues would
block the rerelease of many earlier recordings, at least for some time.
Based on this, I reasoned that the public would hold onto their vinyl
collections until they were satisfied that the music they wanted was
well-represented in the new format. I predicted that it would be
decades before the CD prevailed over the LP. I was wrong by a factor of
100s. I forgot that the music buying public has an average age of 13
and didn't give a damn if they couldn't find a particular performance of
a Bach cantata or the original iteration of Fleetwood Mac.
More importantly, I didn't understand then how the CD world would more
closely resemble the 78rpm disc world than the 33rpm world. We saw a
revival of small labels with the ability of almost anyone to get a
recording to the public. More emblematically we saw the wholesale
rerelease of the lost libraries of the 78rpm era. Material that never
made onto vinyl and essentially unavailable for decades was suddenly in
print again on CD and/or digital download (iTunes, etc.)
The digital world also meant that the "long tail" of the record catalogs
stayed in print. Plus there was the opportunity to set right the
mistakes of the past. For instance, the CD versions of each of The
Beatles' albums included the two songs that appeared in the British
releases but removed in the US releases. Badly edited performances were
remastered for CD release (thanks to access to the original multi-track
recordings). In other words, with a few exceptions, the catalogs of the
CD and digital recording world turned out to be broader, more diverse
and far richer that that of the vinyl world. Who knew?
I think there are important and useful parallels between what happened
and is happening in recordings and what we are seeing in the world of
the written word. The aren't necessarily one-to-one parallels and it
remains to be seen how or whether the benefits are realized and whether
they off-set what is lost. For the moment, it seems that there is more
potential than real gains but we're still on the near side of the curve.
It is important that as librarians we keep an open mind about the new
technology and think about the ultimate usefulness or harm that comes
with these changes. I've argued many times that we've come to accept
and even enshrine the limitations of the codex as a reading medium.
We're sentimental about the idea of curling up with a good book and tend
to make excuses about the problems we have in finding a passage or the
tiny reproductions of photos.
As one example, our book ground recently read _Sacred Trash_. One
member warned me that the book introduced a confusion of names as
principals in the history of the Cairo Genizah and it was hard to keep
track. As an experiment, I purchased the book via Kindle. This allowed
me to highlight each person by name the first time they were introduced.
Simply touch the word I wanted to highlight and select the appropriate
option from the menu. This created a list of notes I could refer to
whenever I wanted to identify someone when they appeared again in the
narrative. Plus the ability to easily search through the book for
subsequent appearances of that name. The printed equivalent of this
feature would involve numerous post-it notes, marginal scrawls, dog
earred pages and I still wouldn't be able to find what I wanted. In
addition, I noticed that selecting a photo or illustration from the
Kindle text allowed me to open the image and zoom in for better viewing.
Tiny, poor quality images, forced to fit on a half-page of a paperback
edition, could be viewed at full-size and good resolution on the Kindle.
During our group discussion, when someone would comment that they
couldn't make out something in a photo, I could show them a better
version of the image. Similarly when a name came up in the discussion,
I was able to zip to the reference quickly. I consider these to be a
clear win for digital publishing.
On the other hand, when we read _The Hare With Amber Eyes_, Kindle
customers discovered that their edition lacked the image of the family
tree included in the print edition. However, this was not the fault of
the technology; the situation could have just as easily been reversed.
The digital book world has already demonstrated its potential to unlock
and restore the libraries and publishers' catalogs - the "long tail" -
and make available works lost to marketing and inventory considerations.
It doesn't answer the issues emerging in best-seller world, often
exacerbated by digital technology, and the textbook world is so broken
that it is hard to imagine anything that will get us out of that mess.
But these aren't problems created by digital technology, only exposed by
it.
The potential for self-publishing, "printing" small runs, for making
lost works available again, for simultaneous publication in a range of
formats according to users' needs, and for democratizing (is that a
word?) the publishing industry again, are all promising features of the
digital book world. I think librarians should embrace these
opportunities. At the same time, I understand we need to keep one eye
on the bottom line while still taking the long view of what's changing,
what's gained and what's lost, in the process.
Lee Jaffe
Planning & Assessment Librarian
Mathematics • Applied Mathematics & Statistics
Philosophy • Theater Arts • Jewish Studies
2290 McHenry Library
University of California
Santa Cruz, Calif. 95064
831-459-3297
ldja...@ucsc.edu
http://people.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/
On 8/1/12 2:06 PM, Shmuel Ben-Gad wrote:
The question, i suppose, is are e-books going to be to paper books what
cars were to horse and buggies, virtually totally displacing them, or
more like televison has been to radio and motion pictures, by
nomeans displacing the odler media but rransforming the total media
landscape.
I think only time will tell. I do not see myself, as yet, a lot of
scholars necessarily dying to read long treatises (as opposed to
scholarly articles) electronically, but that may change, of course. I
am neither a prophet nor a son of a prophet.
Shmuel Ben-Gad,
Gelman Library,
George Washington University.
"Taste has never been corrupted by simplicity."
--Joseph Joubert
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Andrea Rapp <anrapp2...@yahoo.com
<mailto:anrapp2...@yahoo.com>> wrote:
As I do inventory of our back "stacks," and I see all these
wonderful turn-of-the century classics like Graetz' History of the
Jews, a set of Scrolls: Essays on Jewish History and Literature and
Kindred Subjects, by C. Deutch, or Stanley's History of the Jewish
Church--and all the others--I'm sure you know the ones I mean-- I
have to wonder--will researchers want to consult these anymore?
They're out of copyright, so will Google Book Project be what all
the young researchers use for such works? In a few more years,
will there be a point in libraries having these volumes? I don't
know the answer and would like to hear from those who work in
research insitututions.
Andrea Rapp
Wise Temple, Cincinnati
Andrea Rapp
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