The Library in the New Age | The New York Review of Books - June 12, 2008

The Library in the New Age - Robert Darnton

Writing a blog with the expectation that it will last forever, or even taking for granted that it will be eternally available, strikes me as illogical.  I worry that blogs will someday be lost, their texts disappearing as the plug is pulled on servers and memory, as judgments are passed on what is worth retaining and what will be thrown into the ethereal dustbin, truly as if it never existed.

I believe that blogs-to-books technology will continue to improve and that more and more folks will publish their blogs in a material form, suitable for keeping and selling.  Avid readers will want to have volumes of their favorites, maybe a selected "best of" anthology of favorite entries from their favorites blogs.  Could they aggregate these, favorite them, or in some other way keep them all in one electronic place?  Sure.  But that isn't the point.  There is some permanent and tangible about a book.  The best writing will find its way into that form.

Robert Darnton takes on the idea of Google digitizing the contents of libraries.  People who read Dr. Darnton's work, such as his recent The Case for Books, too casually will think that he is against the idea of digitizing.  No, he is not.  He is against the notion that this is somehow a death knell for brick and mortar libraries.

Dr. Darnton brings some cogent and, I believe, successful arguments to bear on the topic.  Google's approach is for the here and now, not for long term storage.  There are a great many varieties of a single book or document. Which is best?  Who makes the call about which shows up first in a search?

The biggest argument for the continuation of libraries is simply the magnitude of published material.  Who digitizes what?  Who guarantees the accuracy?  Google cannot do this alone.  I predict, if we do digitize everything (which is unlikely), then we'll have a variety of libraries; Google being just one of many, like the Library of Congress is one of many, though an enormous one.

I use libraries.  I can't imagine trying to read a book on the laptop and I am not going to buy any e-reader that only uses a proprietary format--I'm a reluctant iPod user, too.  Yet, I rely on digital versions of every essay I discuss here, including this one.  I can't afford every literary magazine and it would suck royally if I couldn't provide a link to the essay so that if anyone ever happens to read this, they can share the experience.

My world needs both avenues to information.