The Library in the New Age

Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library, who helped advocate for open access at the University, has written an essay for the New York Review of Books on "what it means to be a library in the digital age"

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.

Read the whole essay -- and check out our roundups on this year's open access announcements from Harvard and Harvard Law, including links to lots of great discussions from and related to IS2K7: University: Knowledge Beyond Authority.