Here is an excerpt from an interesting New Yorker article by Anthony Grafton on the future of reading. Reading seems to be a theme of this week's blog.
"Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books." Soon the sunlight will gleam on the varnished tables in the new Goodwin Library. Read the article here or in the library.
Source: The New Yorker Nov. 6, 2007 beginning on page 50--Anthony Grafton teaches European history at Princeton.
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