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March 10, 2008
Steles
Digital Libraries “are about new ways of dealing with knowledge: preserving, collecting, organizing, propagating, and accessing it—-not about deconstructing existing institutions and putting them inside an electronic box.” Witten and Bainbridge, p6
Digital Case stores, disseminates, and preserves the intellectual output of Case faculty, departments and research centers in digital formats (both “born digital” items as well as materials of historical interest that have been digitized). Kelvin Smith Library manages Digital Case on behalf of the university. With Digital Case, KSL assumes an active role in the scholarly communication process, providing expertise in the form of a set of services (metadata creation, secure environment, preservation over time) for access and distribution of the university’s collective intellectual product.
So, I have been suddenly overcome by the fact that a library created in the Song Dynasty in China has existed since 1100A.D. Well, not really this fact, as I’m actually disappointed that no library has continually existed longer than this (seems like there should be one somewhere) regardless, what has overcome me is that many of the items in the collection are stone slabs called “steles.” They are located in Xi’an “an ancient walled city in central China.” But what has most impressed me is the photograph of a man holding up a “rubbing” from a stele.
When I was a kid I would sometimes do a “rubbing” of a gravestone using paper and chalk. It never occurred to me that books could be handled this way. I am just struck thinking about how libraries today lend the actual item (a print, to be sure, but the actual item); and that we are now creating copies that can be downloaded and so on. And yet, here is an example that is over 900 years old where a patron could come in, get some paper—or whatever they used—and chalk—or whatever they used—and rub off a copy, roll it up, and then walk out. Each person could come in and take away any of the 2000 items in a sort of first shot at downloading a version.
And, as Witten and Bainbridge drolly note, “We think of the library as the epitome of a stable, solid, unchanging institution, and indeed the silent looming presence of 2,000 enormous stone slabs—often called the “forest of steles”—certainly projects a sense of permanence.
Posted by twh7 at March 10, 2008 07:26 PM
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