Today’s Chronicle

There are two really interesting articles in the The Uncertain Fate of Scholarly Artifacts in a Digital Age and talks about a topic very close to Matt K’s heart: the preservation of the products and technology of the digital information age. (Ah, I see that he’s already covered it; but, alas! This is what I’ve come here to say today so I’ll mention it for my own records. . .). One very interesting mention that I see in this article is a quote from Nicholson Baker, who is not known for his technological savvy, but has been known recently for his foray into newspaper preservation. It seems that he has an aversion to the librarian practice of dumping old print. As the Library of Congress librarian Deanna Marcum notes, “Libraries were never designed to store everything,” but Baker writes in his book Double Fold (a book i’ve had by my bedside for two years in the hope that sleeptime osmosis might give me the opportunity to consume it) that they should at least try.
The second article by John Unsworth, The Next Wave: Liberation Technology, is a read that requires (for me) more than a cursory glance. The topic–“Open” initiatives (“open source, open systems, open standards, open access, open archives, open everything”)–is not one i’m too familiar with, but one that will have a huge bearing on my interests and work. Perhaps I could work the topic into my independent study this semester on digital Shakespeare? Hmm . . . probably not the same kind of copyright issues.
Regardless, good day for the Chronicle.