Thursday 26 June 2008

The Library in the New Age

I have just read an interesting article by Robert Darnton published recently in the New York Review of Books.

The first half outlines the rise of information and how it has been recorded and distributed to society throughout history.

The second part of the article analyses the Google Book Project and discusses how this Project may or may not impact on the role of the research library. I quite enjoyed reading the article as many of the author's points reflect my opinions of Google's project to digitise the worlds' book collection.

You can find the article here

2 comments:

Felix Wilson said...

Yes, it is interesting. There has been a lot of discussion about the future on this blog recently, which is quite interesting in itself.
Another article you might find interesting is here: https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/556.
It is called "Alphabetical Order, the Dewey Decimal System, and Google" and looks at the history of organizing knowledge from a Librarians perspective.

Roger said...

This is a very interesting article and makes some thought provoking points in favour of print. e.g. the French savour the smell of books so much that you can buy a patch to put on your computer or ebook reader that gives out the treasured musty book smell! Lots more of interest in this article that might make us pause in the race to remove paper from our libraries.