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could experience a book both as a historical
artifact and a container of images and ideas.
The Gutenberg Bible or even a mass-produced
pulp novel from the 1940s carries within
its bindings archaeological evidence of its creation,
which is something a digital document
will have stripped away. Philosopher Walter
Benjamin called this the “aura.” In his nowclassic
essay “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin writes:
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a
work of art is lacking in one element: its presence
in time and space, its unique existence
at the place where it happens to be. This unique
existence of the work of art determined the
history to which it was subject throughout
the time of its existence. This includes the
changes which it may have suffered in physical
condition over the years as well as the various
changes in its ownership. … The presence
of the original is the prerequisite to the concept
of authenticity.”
In more practical terms, a digitized book
is bled of everything but its bytes. Its physical
presence on the shelf or in one’s hand is
gone.“Because the physical document is a disk
or tape, it doesn’t become as important anymore,”suggests
Kathleen Smith, assistant director
of special collections at the Heard Library.
She goes on to explain how that idea changes
the way we interact with a piece of writing.“If
you think of how many transactions occur via
e-mail today, a system will have to be created
that can harvest that data and keep it in its
original digital format because it is virtual
born. It has never seen paper. If it is going to
continue to be there, you’re going to have to
upgrade the data as every succeeding generation
creates new computer technology. Trouble
arises, however, each time you migrate
something. Small pieces of information are
lost. What could be read in the year 2090 is
going to be different from what was created in
2002. The same gist will be there, but it will
not be in the same format. It will not look like
what you e-mailed a hundred years ago. It will
be stripped of its personality and will be just
pure data rather than what we would consider
correspondence. And that is scary because then
you lose that context.”
Without context, the meaning of a piece
of communication can be potentially misconstrued.
The obvious example is sarcasm,
where the actual meaning of what is said is
exactly the opposite of what the chosen words
mean. Parents of teenagers are well schooled
in decoding sarcasm. Once the context is
removed, however, the words revert to their
dictionary meaning. The intent and meaning
of the words is reversed. Digitizing documents
peels away ever-more subtle and
complex contexts.
The only solution is for Special Collections
to become a museum of technology. Smith
describes how Special Collections is being
transformed. “When word processing first
began, everyone was using Wordstar,” she
says.“You can’t find anyone who has that program
anymore. Anyone who has anything on
a Wordstar disk right now, unless you’re going
to the Library of Congress, is not going to find
a machine that can read it. The software is
gone. So all the things that had been stored—
whatever it was—are gone if they were never
printed out. If you did print it or reformat it,
you changed the integrity of the document. In
a sense, it’s sort of like putting something on
the Web; you’re publishing it in a different format.”The
same is the case with hardware, such
as information stored on 5-and-a-quarter-inch
floppy disks or on tape.
There are, however, even more dire ramifications.
“Most likely, we are going to lose a
huge swath of our cultural history,” says Juanita
Murray, director of Special Collections.“Much
of the information created with archaic soft-
ware and stored in long-obsolete hardware
will be lost.” More troubling, Murray cites,
is what is happening to CIA reports from the
Vietnam War. These documents were stored
on computer tape reels. Because the tapes are
losing their magnetization, the data is disintegrating
faster than the government can transfer
it to more stable digital-storage hardware.
This means that future generations of historians
will have less original material upon
which to understand and interpret important
historical events, such as the Vietnam War.
As our culture moves further and further
away from pen on paper, from printed pages
bound into books, questions emerge about
The verb “to search” has now
been replaced with “to google.”
“What worries me as a librarian,”
says Gherman, “is the idea that
Google could drive out all other
avenues of access.”
control of the information. A library no longer
simply purchases a book and puts it on the
shelf for everyone to use. Who controls access
to the information now that the choices available
have broadened so greatly and access to
those choices has become so easy? It’s a critical
issue. Libraries traditionally are open to
everyone because these institutions are founded
on the premise that information is free. Corporations,
however, are structured to profit
from content. Consequently, the more involved
corporations like Google become not only in
production of the content but also in the access
to it, the less likely it will be freely available in
a timely fashion. For those who are affluent,
this is not a problem. For Third-World countries
desperate for the latest tests and studies
on issues like AIDS, the dilemma is very real.
By the end of the next century, the question
of who controls content will be answered.
V a n d e r b i l t M a g a z i n e 41