APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING

 

In these difficult and frustrating times, I thought it would be nice to
share the wonderful words of Stephen Fry from his documentary on Sunday:
"Fry's Planet Word".  Here is the transcript of the segment where he
talks about libraries.  Enjoy!

 

Fry's Planet Word

There were more and more books.  But what to do with them? Build more
libraries?

 

Almost everything I am, I owe to libraries. When I was a child there
were no great libraries around.  

 

Libraries still for me have this extraordinary charge when I get in one;
I feel this buzz, it is almost sexual.  Behind these bound copies are
voices, people murmuring to you, seducing you, dragging you into their
world.  I suppose if I have one campaign I can really get behind it is
saving libraries.  Everyone surely has the right to access the voices of
the past.  

 

Screenshot of Oxford University Library - The Bodleian 

 

But these days the library has another challenge, how to stay relevant
in a digital age.  While the internet has many mundane uses, from
booking holidays to doing our weekly grocery shop it also has a colossal
impact on the way we consume words and knowledge.   We can access almost
instantaneously an enormous repository of information of a mere click of
a button or a swipe of a finger.  

 

Interview with Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections:

What really marks a great library out is how the collections are used,
how access is provided and the kind of environments, both physical and
virtual, that you are able to provide scholars and the whole interested
public with access to information.  This great archive that we are
responsible for and the whole library world is collectively responsible
for, it really needs to be used to be meaningful.

Fry - Will you move in the next 100 years away from receiving atomic
matter?  

 

Ovenden: That process has already begun, and it is really driven by the
publishers, there are many publishers that only publish electronically.
So we have to do digital preservation now.

Fry - So you have library shelves but you also have racks of servers?

 

Ovenden: We certainly do, and so we also have staff whose job it is to
keep stuff safe, to keep the bits alive so that scholars in 400 years
time will be able to access the information that is being produced now
just as we are able to access the information printed by the great
scholars.

 

Fry - Yes, it is a different expertise.  

We are producing and consuming more and more words in a digital form.
But do our technological advances mean that the printed version of the
book will become as moribund clay Kunai form tablet.  

 

Interview with Prof Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard Library
University

Prof Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard Library University is an expert
on the history of books

 

Darnton: I have been invited to so many conferences on the 'death of the
book', that I am convinced that it is very much alive and we have
statistics to prove it.  Each year more books are produced than the
previous year, there was a dip during the recession, but next year there
will be 1 million new titles produced worldwide and yet at the same time
more digital works are coming out and the future is decidedly digital.
I think we are living in a time of transition which the two media
coexists, which is what I think makes it so exciting.  

 

Fry - And they will continue to coexist?

 

Darnton: Well one thing we have learnt in the history of books, which is
a huge expanding field, that one medium does not displace another.  So
of course as you know, the radio did not displace the newspaper, the
television did not kill the radio and the internet did not destroy
television and so on.  So I think actually what is happening now is the
electronic means of communication, all kinds of hand held devices, which
people reads books are actually increasing the sales of ordinary printed
books.

 

Fry - Or the same numbers of people are reading more? One or the other?

 

Darnton: I think both. That I can't absolutely prove, however it is
certain I think that a lot of people use hand held electronic devices
for one kind of reading and the use codex for another kind of reading
and that the interest of the availability of books online is getting
people more excited about reading in general, I think it is fascinating
moment when reading itself if undergoing a change.  

 

Fry: I like to have a foot in both camps, the shiny new digital world of
technology and the traditional path to knowledge which is embodied by
the library.  I do hope that libraries survive; they are more than just
buildings in the same way books are more than just print and paper.  

 

As the poet, philosopher and political theorist John Milton said books
are not absolute dead things they do contain a potency of life 'he who
destroys a book kills reason itself'.  As we all know one of the first
acts of a tyrant is to destroy a library and to burn books, they want to
control literature and the elitists want to horde the power and the
knowledge that is contained in books.   But digital words cannot be
burned and myriad connections of the web versions make online
information mercurial.

 

 

Fiona Leslie
Marketing Communications Manager * OCLC EMEA
8th Floor, West Wing * 54 Hagley Road * Birmingham B16 8PE * United
Kingdom
t +44-(0)121-456 4656 * f +44-(0)121-456 4680  m: +44-(0)7872 635556
http://www.linkedin.com/in/fionaleslie
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/fionaleslie> 
e [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>  * w www.oclc.org
<http://www.oclc.org/> 

OCLC (UK) Ltd
Registered in England and Wales
Company No. 498573
Registered Address : Brincliffe House, 861 Ecclesall Road, Sheffield,
S11 7AE 

 

OCLC EMEA Regional Council Meeting, 28 & 29 February 2012

The theme for the Meeting is "Developing A New Blend of Library"
To register and find out more, go to:

http://www.oclc.org/uk/en/councils/emea/meetings/2012annual/default.htm