We have posted several items about libraries, books, Google digitization, etc. by Robert Darnton, author and director of the Harvard University Library. This post has all of our coverage including links to a few radio/podcast interviews.
At the lecture, Darnton discussed how electronic media expand possibilities for historical writing — enabling historians to organize and share documents they discover in their research while allowing readers to explore only the topics that interest them most.
“E-books of this type will transform the relationship between authors and readers,” he said. “Readers will actually become collaborators — or even adversaries — of the scholars who provide the components of each book.”
Darnton shared details from his forthcoming digital project about the 18th-century French book trade, which features a colorful mix of smugglers, pirate publishers, counterfeiters, pornographers and itinerant booksellers. Censorship laws were particularly severe in France, so the book trade required a great deal of secrecy. The writings of Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers often circulated in pirate and incomplete, digested editions.
[Snip]
Darnton said that digital publications help solve what he calls the problem of “archival overload,” or the collection of minutiae uncovered by his historical research. A printed book could not accommodate all of the letters, accounting records, shipping documents and other records he found of the French book trade.
By contrast, he said his digital project will enable readers to engage with this rich collection of material however they choose. “You can imagine the printed text as the apex of the pyramid with a series of layers underneath,” he said. “Readers will find their own path through the materials.”
The digital version will include additional chapters about a variety of topics, translations of important letters and scanned original documents in French.
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