Oregon Legal Research Blog
If you write, and you want people to read what you write, now and in the future, take heed:
Librarians Rule (again)! Yes we can weed or delete your magnum opus from library collections, but, more to the point, we have an even greater passion for preserving your legacy!
Read this On the Media interview with Brewster Kahle:
“An Internet Archivist Recommits to Books,” June 10, 2011:
“Entrepreneur, philanthropist and digital librarian Brewster Kahle: ‘ … And then the question is, is after the digitized is there any real reason to have the physical books. And we’re determining yes, there absolutely is. We’re discovering what librarians have known for centuries in this new digital world, so I —I’m feeling like a little naive….’” [Link to full interview.]
Librarians love, love, love digital information and access and world-wide dissemination of information, but:
If you write a book and article and you want it to last at least as long as humans do, which may not be all that long in the scheme of things (whatever):
MAKE A FEW PRINT COPIES AND DISTRIBUTE THEM WIDELY at libraries, archives, safe deposit boxes, or wherever else they might be found if the digital copy vanishes, which it will.
Digital is nothingness (naughti-ness). It’s powerful nothingness, as all naughtiness is (think Seinfeld, silence, and space), but it is still nothing.
Digital is communication across the globe
Print is somethingness. It’s not forever. Nothing is. But it is tangible. It is archival and archivable.