New Outlook on the Book
Elaine Radman
Have you noticed since getting into library school that you have a new outlook on books, copyright, and other things that you never took seriously before: Google-bot, webcrawler, search query, many, many lines of html code, and even the number “200”(gotta love cataloguing)! Not to mention that certain survival skills you learned as an undergrad, like photocopying a whole textbook, to save money for coffee, now seems like a sin (but downloading songs and movies off the Internet is still okay). Furthermore, while in my undergrad I was taught that Wikipedia was the bane to the scholarly world and it shouldn’t be cited. In SIS, it’s an open source encyclopedia that has as much merit as any other information resource (for those of you who doubt this claim, the journal Nature did studies in 2005 and 2006 and it found that Wikipedia had the same degree of accuracy and error as the Encyclopaedia of Britannica).
That’s why I like this comic by xkcd, where the book is valued as gold by librarians.
- Advantages to dating librarians ©XKCD
Ever since I walked through the SIS doors, I have been inducted into a world where we view books not just as stories, but as branches reaching to the author, publisher, printing press and whatever Wikipedian community supports that book. If you take Prof. McNally’s History of Books and Printing, you’ll see a book not only for its content but for its medium. When I look at a book now, I see the typeface, the acid paper, the name of publisher and even how it was printed onto the paper. This new point-of-view even translated into my movie world; I was watching the trailer to Twilight and couldn’t help but notice that the movie title used a serif typeface. Talk about scary!
The issue around copyright is what really took me by surprise. I just mentioned that I had to photocopy a class course pack to a fellow SIS student and I promptly received a stern lecture about copy right violation. I hadn’t even had the opportunity to mention that my professor had told our whole class to do this and that it was numbered less than 30 pages, well below the level of ripping off any publisher or author!