On Monday, Postdoctoral Fellow Mary Murrell spoke to a crowd of about 30 in Helen C. White Hall, detailing the history of mass book digitization and its developers’ quest towards modernity.
Murrell, a University of California, Berkeley graduate with a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology, addressed the crowd of professors and library aficionados. These are people who said things such as, “From the perspective of a contemporary academic librarian …” and, “Coming back to the topic of the permanence and impermanence of paper, perhaps I can make an impertinent plug.” Their interactions made for a jovial atmosphere bursting with intellectual stimuli. These people were smart cookies, and they were there to learn about mass book digitization.
And learn they did. Murrell outlined a brief history of book digitization and how it kick-started the practice of photographic reproduction, while simultaneously offering a critique of the book, which many librarians, scientists and intellectuals view as inadequate.
According to Murrell, scientists in the early 20th century began experimenting with microfilm, a form of digitization that condenses the contents of a book to miniscule sizes. With this technique, she said, scientists hypothesized that entire archives could be packed away into a snuffbox. With these new forms of manufacturing and storing, scientists and librarians began to speculate about the future of the book while calling into question the utility of the current format, Murrell said. Murrell shared a PowerPoint slide with a quote from Paul Otlet and Robert Goldschmidt, two of the founders of information science – the study of documentation – and pioneers of microfilm.
“As far as the book is concerned, despite admirable technological progress since the 15th century, all is far from perfect,” the slide read.
Many scholars at the time of microfilm’s introduction, such as Vannevar Bush, thought that books obscured knowledge, and that book authors relied heavily on “irrelevant rhetorical flourish,” Murrell said. They argued that connecting ideas between books was of the utmost importance. Libraries at the time, as they are now, were geared toward books. This troubled Bush, who believed that fluid indexing by means of association of ideas was more important than sorting by strict categories (e.g., history or biology).
And of course, the most promising plan for introducing this dissemination of information, according to Murrell, was microfilm. Even H.G. Wells had positive words for the technology, which he believed would lead to an “intellectual unification of our race” and a complete, shared memory for all humankind.
Much of what was discussed in the lecture sounded awfully similar to the Internet. Murrell’s focus in her research is analog digitization, but it would have been nice to hear connections between what these early scientists and scholars hoped to achieve and what has been achieved through the Internet. E-book readers, which are obviously analogous to the book, offer tremendous amounts of storage space and can access thousands of volumes from the Internet. Online scholarly databases offer connections between ideas, rather than just categories, and hypermedia lead readers fluidly from one association to the next. The history of mass book digitization very much seems to be a precursor to the proliferation of information during the Information Age. But that’s another lecture.
