Untitled - witz cultural

40HYPERTEXT 3.0 Far more important, libraries frequently do not have that kind of informationmissed by Internet search tool in handwritten, Qped, or printed formbecause many of these materials are out of fashion and hence fall beneath theradar. As an old-fashioned hide-bound scholar whose first books dependedon manuscripts and extremely rare printed material, I quickly discovered thatmy own university library and others had neither the information I needednor the information about the information. For example, looking for the publishedtranscripts of sermons fohn Ruskin commented on in his diary whilein the midst of an agonizing religious crisis, I discovered that major New Yorklibraries had no record of whatwas once an extremely popular and profitablegenre (at least three weekly British periodicals dispatched stenographers totake down the sermons of popular preachers; I stumbled onto the fact of theirexistence when Ruskin quoted from one in a famous letter to The Times;thegreat Victorian scholar Geoffrey Tillotson, then my Fulbright advisor, told me:"I think you're on to something important. Follow it up."). I finally found uncataloguedcopies stored in a carton in the basement of a theological seminary.Another example: the catalogue of the Beineke rare book library at Yale-"accessed"by snailmail and the good offices of a librarian-listedthe manuscriptof one of Ruskin's own childhood notes on sermons (his mother madehim do it), but I unexpectedly discovered the valuable first draft ofthese notesin a display case in the tiny museum in Coniston, where Ruskin lived formany years. Even if one knows where materials are located through the scholarlygrapevine, they may not be maintained in easily searchable form. Aftertraveling to the Isle of Wight to work with the vast collection of Ruskin lettersand diaries at the Bembridge School, I discovered they were uncatalogued.Even locating the catalogue entry for an item (the information about the information)doesnt mean you will find it. Thus, when I thought I had locatedin the then-British Museum Library a crucial anonymous exhibition pamphletin fact written by the artist V7. Holman Hunt himsel{, I submitted mycall-slip, waited forty-five minutes, and discovered that it had been "destroyedby enemy action" during the Blitz; I unexpectedly bumbled onto a copy at thebottom of a trunk when, as I was leaving his adopted granddaughter's home,she asked, "Would you like to look through some things in the garagel" That'senough of what van Dam called van "barefoot-in-the-snow stories" (889) inhis keynote address at the world's first hlpertext conference. Two points: first,it's obviously better to be lucky than good, and, second, digitizing all the librarycatalogues and deep Web material in the world does not help if the informationyou need is not there in the first place-and for much of the mostinteresting kind of research that cataloguing information does not exist.