Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

I like to listen to lectures on my Ipod. Recently I loaded up a talk delivered by Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library, at the University of Oregon on 12 Novembrer: "Digitize, Democratize: Google, Libraries, and the Future of Books." I am grateful to UO for making this lecture available here
.
It was an excellent talk, covering past revolutions in publishing, the digitization of library materials, Google Books and the controversy surrounding it, the role of research libraries in our age, and some anecdotes from history and literature that illuminated these issues. Prof. Darnton is an insider; Harvard's library, after all, is one of those whose volumes were scanned to get Google Books launched.

Then the audience began asking questions. Most of them quite good ones. And he gave good answers.

But at 57 minutes into the talk, a woman (not identified in the podcast) rose to address Darnton. Suffice it to say that I found her words worth transcribing.

Google America.
So, just paraphrasing you
in framing my question, do we want it?
Do we want something
so ubiquitous, omniscient,
dominating, and controlling
as part of our national defense
and as national defense is the most powerful country in the globe
and do we need to increase our defense expenditures
to defend Google
as a technological infiltration
of all there is?
Having said that, why don't you compare it to oil,
the information highway
to the old feudal system of charging a toll
--every time you wanted to pass a fiefdom
you had to pay another toll--
and this is the same as a river
of information
and books can be parallel to our medical records and everything else
and, and why don't you look at it as a new economy, for one,
and two, why don't you look it as oil,
as something that depletes the earth's resources,
because it uses so many metals,
and rare substances,
that have to be mined,
and devastate other nations
to support this monster
that we don't need.
And it's also very rude.
It introduces rudeness and coldness to our culture!
And I went around thanking people at Columbia University
for not having their laptops out every place you go
and every restaurant
and every cafe
every street corner
and every park bench
like has happened in Berkeley.
It looks like a factory town.
And I wonder why we don't look at this thing
with contempt and condemnation
and allow them to take over every apparatus:
our legal system
our medical system
our energy system
and every.
Single.
Thing.
And how can we stop it?
Maybe we should look at it as the next abortion clinic,
the next animal experimentation,
attitudinal framework-type thing--
So the question is,
why are you trying to sell this thing to us?
You know, it's a high-class selling,
it's high-class selling
it's privileged selling
trying to get the elitism of Melville,
intonation of Melville and Emerson, you know, to--
I WANT YOUR ANSWER!

This nonsense is even more impressive to the ear than it is here in print. Darnton replied with great aplomb, but I am left wondering whether he made a dent in her passionately-expressed distress.

I thought you might like to join me in admiring this specimen.

Ed Felten just pointed out the OCLC's thousand books most frequently appearing on library shelves. He was disappointed (and so am I) to find very little science and technology among these volumes.

A good tip from shimgray led me to this, with pictures here.

Someone rearranged all the books in a San Francisco bookstore sorted by color:



It only took the art world 25 years to arrive where Todd Johnson and I once stood.

( I've written about this elsewhere. )