Monday, December 20, 2004

An Ode to Libraries

Will digitising books, gathered in great libraries around the world, sound the death knell for libraries?  I doubt it very much.  There are great benefits to the digitized word, but, the digitized word will not replace the edifices which currently house wonderful collections of books.

Ben Macintyre enjoys libraries, and he shares his thoughts on them, and the coming online world of libraries, in a piece titled “Paradise is paper, vellum and dust.”

From Macintyre’s piece.

“I have spent a substantial portion of my life since in libraries, and I still enter them with a mixture of excitement and awe. I am not alone in this. Veneration for libraries is as old as writing itself, for a library is more to our culture than a collection of books: it is a temple, a symbol of power, the hushed core of civilisation, the citadel of memory, with its own mystique, social and sensual as well as intellectual. Even people who never enter libraries instinctively understand their symbolic power.”

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Posted by John Venlet on 12/20 at 08:55 AM
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