medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
This thread has now gone towards the publishing industry's indirect
pressure on younger scholars and its quite direct pressure on library
budgets (aren't there any not-for-profit academic publishers?), but
I'd like to comment on another access issue raised earlier in the
thread:
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Christopher Crockett
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
[...]
>> There's hope even for venerable strongholds like the British Library and
> the BNF.
>
> my reading of their Act is rather the reverse --that there has been a notable
> trend in the last few years towards "tightening up" their free access to their
> materials.
As much as the BNF has restricted access to the physical manuscripts,
the venerable institution has still managed to digitize an incredible
amount of manuscripts (microfilms for the most part but still...),
thanks to the great efforts of the late Thierry Delcourt, who was head
of the manuscripts division. Gallica now claims to have around 25000
(and counting) medieval and modern manuscripts. The BL slowly but
surely has also being digitizing whole manuscripts (788, as of today).
And I'm probably too optimistic here but there might be a time when
some libraries will have to review their policies to make up for the
declining number of physical readers tired of being redirected to
those ghastly microfilm readers or having to come up with
codicological reasons (legitimate or not).
Digital surrogates will never be the same as the Real Thing, but they
do help a lot to trigger serendipity, curiosity and interest, not just
among researchers but also among the public and the younger
generations, without which, I dare to say, research would become
pointless.
Laurent Brun
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