browsing

This weekend I attended the smart, erudite, and emotional conference in celebration of Daniel Traister. As usual, I walked away thinking Librarians are deeply learned, wildly valuable folk. In the first day Keynote, Roger Chartier tossed off a comment on one possible effect of digitization. He suggested that browsing in a library could become only a memory in the history of reading.

Think about this ye denizens of the second-floor of Stockton’s library (or of Reference South, for that matter). If libraries as we know them go away, if there are no longer books shelved in open stacks, then the serendipities and pleasures of browsing will disappeare — or surely be much changed.

You can set up an OLC to display neighboring texts — ours already does this — but these lists do not open themselves to easy, reach-out-and-open browsing. Even if full-text, will the experience approximate a walk through the stacks? Try to quickly flip through a full-text book on-line. At the very least, those quiet times, physically surrounded by books with multi-hued bindings, will disappear. But is this important? After all, electronic texts still present what is essential, right? They still present the text, and to a much wider potential audience.

Moving in a slightly different, though related, direction. Books in their current form reveal much about themselves — if we know how to look. Printed books reveal much about the culture within which they were (and are) made, sold, and consumed, that is read. E-texts, though without many of the physical components of printed texts, remain texts that are made, sold, and consumed. How do they reveal these transactions?