Digital Library

“If information is the currency of the knowledge economy, digital libraries will be the banks where it is invested.” (I understand the point, but take issue with the exclusivity of the statement—as databases are by far the bigger banks.)

H.G. Wells was promoting the notion of a “world brain.” I have often thought about this, too. Only in the context of a network of computers, very like the various neurons of our brain connected through dendrites and synapses—the great web of computers unifying into one gigantic Borg.

“Vannevar Bush, the highest-ranking science advisor in the U.S. war effort, urged us to ‘consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library…a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” Pp16 (Memex—Bush’s automated library)

Argument for Digital Humanities by Licklider: http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/licklider.html

"About 85 per cent of my "thinking" time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so. At one point, it was necessary to compare six experimental determinations of a function relating speech-intelligibility to speech-to-noise ratio. No two experimenters had used the same definition or measure of speech-to-noise ratio. Several hours of calculating were required to get the data into comparable form. When they were in comparable form, it took only a few seconds to determine what I needed to know.

"Throughout the period I examined, in short, my "thinking" time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability." (Licklider).

“Wells, Bush, Licklider, and other visionary thinkers were advocating something very close to what we might now call a virtual library. To paraphrase the dictionary definition, something is virtual if it exists in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or name. A virtual library is a library for all practical purposes, but a library without walls—or books.” Pp16

Witten and Bainbridge then make the observation that libraries have always used “virtual” collections, even right from the beginning, in that they used catalogs and indexes. After all, catalogs and indexes are representations of the thing, not the thing itself.

“A library catalog is a complete model that represents, in a predictable manner, the universe of books in the library. Catalogs provide a summary of, if not a surrogate for, library contents. Today we call this “metadata.” And it is highly valuable in its own right.

“The information in library catalogs and bibliographies can be divided into two kinds: the first having reference to the contents of books; the second treating their external character and the history of particular copies. Intellectually only the abstract content of a book—the information contained therein—seems important. But the strong visceral element of books cannot be neglected and is often cited as a reason why book collections will never become ‘virtual’.” Pp 17

Examples: the forest of steles, The Book of Kells (a masterpiece of Western art); “you might believe it was the work of an angel rather than a human being.” –Giraldus Cambrensis, scholar 13th century. (and in art we are aspiring to our god-like natures) pp18

“A picture of the cover may be displayed as a ‘tangible’—or at least memorable—emblem of the physical book itself. Users can browse the collection using graphical techniques of virtual reality. Maybe they will even be able to caress the virtual cover, smell the virtual pages…” pp20