<Richard Ovenden, University of Oxford
Information is constantly under attack. The current debate around the longstanding use of vellum (a parchment made using calf skin) for printing key legislative documents highlights the continued concern over this. Some are advocating a switch from vellum to archive paper, which costs much less and can last up to 500 years.
Recorded information is certainly vulnerable: paper and parchment, and the inks and pigments that are written, drawn or painted on their surfaces, can decay and disappear if not stored in controlled environmental conditions.
And digital information is even more susceptible to degradation than that recorded on vellum. Operating systems and information environments change and develop rapidly, and as a result information created and stored on older systems easily can become unusable. It’s by no means certain that the digital information created by our parliament today will still be secure and reliably accessible in 200 years.
Books and manuscripts have been the targets of thieves for millennia. Whole libraries have been destroyed by invading armies and fanatical idealists. Even nature occasionally has played its part – the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD caused the contents of the Roman library at Herculaneum to become illegible. Libraries and archives have been dealing with these threats for centuries.
But the growth of digital networks as a means of storing and sharing information has created new hazards. Cybersecurity is increasingly a critical concern for modern organisations. All face the potential of hostile attacks on their digital information from cyber-criminals. And as age-old protectors of information, it’s up to libraries and archives to safeguard this knowledge from such assaults.
Paul Cowan/Shutterstock.com
Libraries and archives have tackled the threats to knowledge with great ingenuity for thousands of years. The archives of Merton College, Oxford, for example, were stored from the 14th century in a building purposefully made of stone, with flooring made from tiles rather than wood to eliminate the threat of fire. And the founders of Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1602 required all readers to swear an oath that they would not bring the library into harm, for example by pledging not to “kindle therein any fire nor flame”.
Libraries and archives have also been at the forefront of preserving digital information. Groups such as the Digital Preservation Coalition work together to develop the skills and techniques we need as a society to help manage and preserve the vast amounts of information created in digital formats. They have developed disaster recovery routines, back-up strategies, policies and a host of other collaborative arrangements.
Scholarly information is being protected through physical networks of connected computers, such as LOCKSS – an agency built on the proposition that “lots of copies keeps stuff safe”. And non-profit organisations funded by the library and archive communities, such as Portico, have developed large-scale capabilities for preserving books and journals in digital form, with backups in multiple locations.
AstroStar/Shutterstock.com
Personal information is also of great importance to society. Drafts of poems and novels, and the correspondence of politicians and scientists can help shine light on critical areas of history and science. Libraries and archives have always kept files of the letters of philosophers, such as Isaiah Berlin, or the drafts of speeches of Winston Churchill. But the intellectuals and political big-hitters of today are working in digital form, drafting their speeches using word-processing software, and exchanging emails and text messages with each other.
The preservation of this kind of information is much harder than the analogue equivalents. Librarians and archivists have therefore deployed techniques borrowed from fields such as digital forensics to ensure that these records are safeguarded for future generations to learn from.
But in the challenging fiscal environments of the early 21st century – a period hailed by many as the era of information – society runs the risk of endangering its future by neglecting the role of libraries, archives and museums). The global network of libraries and archives has been, and will remain, fundamental to the preservation and propagation of knowledge.
Society ignores the role of libraries and archives at its peril. Last year saw the 800th anniversary of that “great charter of liberties”, Magna Carta. It survives not in one copy but in multiple originals, distributed around the kingdom, as well as numerous later affirmations. Its survival as a potent set of legal and political concepts was in no small measure thanks to the role of libraries and archives in preserving the original documents.
William Blackstone, one of the most important legal theorists ever, was able to look at original engrossments of Magna Carta while writing his influential legal treatises, for example. His books went on to be read by Thomas Jefferson and the other founders of the American constitution.
Mikhail Evstafiev, CC BY-SA
In more recent times, we need only look at the actions of the army of Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They deliberately destroyed the national library in Sarajevo as a means of erasing the uncomfortable truths of history – a perverse validation of the democratic significance of libraries.
The costs of maintaining such a system of libraries and archives are trivial compared to the costs of other state initiatives or the revenues of the giant tech companies. But across the globe, the funding of many of these institutions is under severe pressure. In an age of “information overload”, we are in real danger of failing to ensure that succeeding societies have access to the wisdom, and error, of their predecessors.
Richard Ovenden, Director of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Brian McNair, Queensland University of Technology
With depressing regularity I return to this column to talk about cuts to precious journalism capacity in Australia, usually at Fairfax. This week it’s the equivalent of 120 editorial positions consigned to the dustbin of journalistic history, on top of the many hundreds, nay thousands, slashed at Fairfax and other news organisations in Australia in the past three years.
Former Age editor Michael Smith* appeared on ABC News Breakfast this morning to say he thought the:
… future of Fairfax as a news organisation would be decided in the next few weeks.
Would the cuts fall on what he called the “flim-flam” of Fairfax commercial properties such as Next, or where so many have already struck – at the heart of the once-proud news producer’s editorial resource?
We can perhaps guess the answer to that question based on the company’s ruthless race for profit in recent times. Nothing wrong with that, if you’re a shareholder or manager on performance-related bonuses. Too bad if you’re a journalist, or indeed a member of Fairfax’s rapidly dwindling readership.
Readers comments on the SMH coverage of the story make clear the disgust of once-loyal customers of a once-quality product, and the fatalistic realisation that it’s all over for Fairfax as a credible supplier of news in this country.
Rupert Murdoch and News must be enjoying it all hugely. With every cut to their only serious rival in the print and press journalism sector in Australia the dominance of News is enhanced. And deservedly so.
While Fairfax has let what one former senior manager described as “150 years of journalistic talent walk out the door” – and that was quite some time ago, so you can double that figure now – News continues to take its journalism seriously.
You might not agree with every anti-ABC rant you read in The Australian; you might be appalled by some of the tabloid headlines and front pages its popular mastheads deliver – but at least News believes and invests in, well, news, which is far from self-evidently the case for Fairfax’s management.
To some extent – and this is not for a moment to understate the tragedy of jobs lost and careers terminated – Fairfax’s loss has been the gain of Guardian Australia, The Conversation, Crikey and other online outlets that have recruited or benefitted from the input of ex-Fairfax staffers. And we know that the future of journalism has little to do with analogue-era newsrooms and permanent editorial positions.
Journalism in Australia will not die because Fairfax is walking away from the job. It just goes elsewhere, to those places where the digital natives live. It has already done so, if we go by declining print circulations, not just in Australia but all over the advanced capitalist world. Journalists of the old school face huge challenges in adapting to this turbulence.
For all that the digital age will bring opportunities for new kinds of journalist, and new kinds of journalism, there is real tragedy about the continuing defenestration of a once central element of the Australian public sphere. Eric Beecher’s 2013 warning of a looming “civic catastrophe” may have been dramatised for effect, but not by much.
The decline of Fairfax places even greater importance on Australian taxpayers continued support for strong public service journalism.
More than that, they must acquire and stick to the habit of paying for online journalism in the way we used to pay for newspapers. “No pay, no play” might be the takeaway from this week’s sad news.
*This attribution has been corrected. An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed this quote to former Age editor-in-chief Andrew Holden.
Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Laurence Grove, University of Glasgow
Here’s a good pub quiz question: what was the world’s first comic?
If you’ve no idea, don’t feel too foolish. It wasn’t even recognised by experts until a few years ago and is still debatable today. But long before Viz, The Beano, Eagle and even Punch, I can answer with reasonable confidence that the accolade goes to the Glasgow Looking Glass of 1825.
Looking Glass
The fortnightly publication, which ran over 19 issues for a year starting in June 1825, offered a satirical view of politics and all aspects of life in the city – before broadening to become the Northern Looking Glass from issue six. The cover of the first issue includes a panoramic cartoon that pokes fun at the world powers of the day, including images of John Bull (personifying England) alongside the likes of the King of Prussia and Charles X of France. Next to this is a cartoon entitled “Fashions for June”, which mocks the excessive styles that people were wearing.
The comic was the brainchild of the English satirical cartoonist William Heath, who had reached Glasgow after fleeing from London to escape debts. Often published under the nom de plume Paul Pry, Heath teamed up with lithographic printer Thomas Hopkirk and his print manager John Watson to produce the publication after meeting Hopkirk in one of the city’s drinking dens.
The Looking Glass contained the world’s first comic strip, namely the History of a Coat, whose adventures from owner to owner ran over three episodes. There were many examples of speech bubbles, such as the heated one below between “Billy the Bully and Ranting Dan”.
Looking Glass
Well before the environmental movement as we know it was a cartoon entitled: “The Consumption of Smoke”, which gives a futuristic before-and-after imagining of city life without factory smoke. Also eye-catching is the hard-hitting cartoon in the lead image that accompanied an essay on the problem of grave robbing; and the one below that depicts English banks crumbling around a fat John Bull next to thrifty Scotsmen – ironic after the banking crisis in our era.
Looking Glass
The Looking Glass was a soaring success, sharply increasing the number of outlets in the first few issues both across the Scottish central belt as well as to Liverpool and London. Its undoing seems to have been its celebrity, with its biting satire making enemies for Heath, who fled back to London at the height of its popularity. He was said to have run up drinking debts. He started a London version of the title but it folded after a few months.
Despite being a trailblazer, the Looking Glass’s claim to be the world’s first comic was overlooked by virtually all historians of the graphic novel until the end of the 20th century. The main previous contender was the Histoire de M. Jabot, which was launched in 1835 by Geneva schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer. Jabot tells the story of its central character’s search for love. The tone is burlesque and caricatural, with humour often provoked by the discordance between the pseudo-lofty tone of the text and the slapstick nature of the accompanying images.
Jabot in action.
Wikimedia
Although only intended for Töpffer’s pupils and close friends, the cartoons were popular enough to engender numerous pirate versions and spin-offs. This included North America’s first comic, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck of 1842 – a year after Punch arrived in the UK.
When I said at the beginning that the Looking Glass’s status as the first comic was debatable, it means ignoring previous examples of narrative heroes like Rowlandson or Hogarth; the speech bubbles used by Isaac Cruikshank and Biblia pauparum; and before-and-afters like the manuscript of Petrarch’s Visions. Depending on how you define “comic”, any of these might be able to stake a claim.
But judging from our 21st-century viewpoint, where we see a comic as something to fold up and take home – something featuring picture stories and available to a mass market – it is hard to argue against the Looking Glass. Jabot is perhaps the world’s first modern graphic novel, though it was not available to the masses of course.
Whatever your point of view, we’re running a four-month exhibition in Glasgow that contains examples of everything I have mentioned – as well as the first copy of Punch and various other artefacts dating as far back as Ancient Egypt. Thanks to a loan from the Kunzle Collection of Los Angeles, we’ll also be able to show the first editions of Oldbuck and Jabot and the original Jabot manuscript side by side for the first time ever.
Töpffer felt that his comics were not worthy of serious attention, let alone academic analysis or gallery displays. This was the way that most people viewed comics until the end of the 20th century. Thankfully the world has now seen the light. Publications like these give us a unique view of society in the early 19th century, and are invaluable in helping us understand how the modern comic came about. Long after the laughing has stopped, they continue to be incredibly important.
Laurence Grove, Professor of French and Text/Image Studies, University of Glasgow
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to a book review of ‘The Crucifixion – Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ,’ by Fleming Rutledge.
For more visit:
http://derekzrishmawy.com/2016/03/16/the-crucifixion-understanding-the-death-of-jesus-christ-by-fleming-rutledge/
Michelle Smith, Deakin University
Throughout history, book reviewers have sometimes been comically off the mark in their assessments.
A New York Times reviewer described Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as “dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion”. While a hater of both Charlotte and Emily Bronte, in his review of Wuthering Heights, found consolation in the idea that the novel “will never be generally read”.
Regardless of occasional misjudgement, reviewers have played a crucial role in shaping literary taste and creating a sense of expectation for a newly published book or emergent author for centuries.
There is an incredible volume of fiction published each year. Reviews highlight books that follow styles and traditions that readers already enjoy and flag new movements that they might not have previous considered.
The grip of traditional print media is being loosened in the digital age. As a result, does the opinion of the professional book reviewer still carry as much significance as it once did? In a world in which anyone can publish a review for an international readership, has the separation between the professional and the individual reader with an opinion been dissolved?
Fan communities, in particular, can usurp the place of the book reviewer in providing a trustworthy opinion from someone with familiarity with similar kinds of books. Moreover, fan and review sites can give a depth of coverage to genres that are often excluded from literary review pages.
Sites such as Goodreads, for instance, include an extensive number of reviews of fantasy, science fiction and Young Adult fiction.
But do fan reviews fulfil the same function as those of traditional book reviewers? Jorge Gracia suggests that a book review must not only “articulate and present an understanding of the book’s thesis and argument” but must “make a judgement as to its value”.
Ideas about “value” differ depending on whether a novel being considered is a work of literary fiction or a teen Gothic novel published in a series like Twilight. Nevertheless, regardless of the perceived literariness of a given book, reader reviews are often more concerned with the pleasures of reading rather than issues of intellectual or aesthetic “value”.
This approach to reviewing can see a classic like Jane Eyre lumped with a one-star rating for being “boring and unbelievable”.
Nevertheless, the dispersal of reviewing power from the control of a handful of critics to a wide community of readers online also allows for the idiosyncratic views of individuals to be moderated by the consensus of the majority. While “Gabriella” “never bought the romance between Jane and Mr. Rochester”, over a million ratings and twenty-thousand individual reviews still sees Bronte’s classic novel receive a score of 4.08. It reassuringly edges out Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight at 3.53.
The decline of the book reviewer and reviewing culture has been lamented since long before anyone owned a home computer. Yet the recent explosion in the volume of published opinions about books in some ways only magnifies the need for informed judgements by those whose job it is to critique.
Reviewers will not always be correct in their assessment of what a novel’s “value” is, as scathing reviews of many enduring novels attest. However, they can place a book within the culture of the time and the literary history of the past in the way that a fan reviewer usually cannot.
Significantly, we also know who professional reviewers are. Fake book reviews full of glowing praise are prolific on sites such as Amazon. One British crime writer, RJ Ellory, even used the Amazon review platform to laud his own books and lump his rivals with gleeful one-star reviews.
At present, book lovers enjoy the best of both worlds. They can measure the advice of an avid reader who has written hundreds of reviews for pleasure with the thoughts of a critic who is paid to read and evaluate books. The pressing question is how might reviewing change when the last of the traditional media outlets to fund professional reviewers disappear and the likes of “Gabriella” are our only guide.
Michelle Smith, Research fellow in English Literature, Deakin University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to a book review of ‘Valkyrie – The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler By Its Last Member, by Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager.
For more visit:
http://www.credomag.com/2016/03/15/even-if-all-not-i-the-plot-to-kill-hitler-michael-haykin/
The links below are to articles taking a look at the new Audible feature for social sharing, ‘Clips.’
For more visit:
– http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/03/17/audible-brings-social-sharing-to-audiobooks/
– http://goodereader.com/blog/audiobooks/audible-clips-allows-you-to-share-audiobook-passages
At the BookShelf 
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