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WT Sharpe · 10-11-2014, 01:11 PM

.....Now extrapolate from this small-scale example and imagine a ten-million-volume, digital, online, humanities research library." (For comparison, the Library of Congress had nearly fifteen million volumes on 550 miles of shelves in the early 1990s, the British Library had about twelve million on a couple of hundred miles, and Harvard's Widener had about 3.5 million.) The catalog would be available on the network. Volumes or chapters might be downloaded to a scholar's personal workstation in a minute or two, then displayed or laser-printed as required. (It matters little where the digital volumes physically reside—just that they can be accessed efficiently—and they occupy little physical space anyway. The collection's existence would not be celebrated architecturally, as the grandiose mass of Widener celebrates the accumulative power of Harvard.) This library would never close. Those addicted to the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow (and prepared to pay for it) would not have to kick the habit; elegant physical volumes could automatically be generated on demand. Nothing would ever be checked out, in somebody else's carrel, lost, or on the reshelving cart. Old volumes could live out their days in safe and dignified retirement in climate-controlled book museums. And the librarians could run backups; look what happened to the Library of Alexandria, where they didn't do it.
..........— William John Mitchell (15 December 1944 – 11 June 2010), Australian-born architect, urban designer, and Dean of the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Recombinant Architecture" in Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution (1997) edited by Peter Droege. Quoted not so much because I am enamored of the scholar's farsightedness, although I am, but because I love the phrase, "the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow."

10-11-2014, 01:11 PM	#2424
WT Sharpe Bah, humbug! Posts: 39,072 Karma: 157049943 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Chesapeake, VA, USA Device: Kindle Oasis, iPad Pro, & a Samsung Galaxy S9.	.....Now extrapolate from this small-scale example and imagine a ten-million-volume, digital, online, humanities research library." (For comparison, the Library of Congress had nearly fifteen million volumes on 550 miles of shelves in the early 1990s, the British Library had about twelve million on a couple of hundred miles, and Harvard's Widener had about 3.5 million.) The catalog would be available on the network. Volumes or chapters might be downloaded to a scholar's personal workstation in a minute or two, then displayed or laser-printed as required. (It matters little where the digital volumes physically reside—just that they can be accessed efficiently—and they occupy little physical space anyway. The collection's existence would not be celebrated architecturally, as the grandiose mass of Widener celebrates the accumulative power of Harvard.) This library would never close. Those addicted to the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow (and prepared to pay for it) would not have to kick the habit; elegant physical volumes could automatically be generated on demand. Nothing would ever be checked out, in somebody else's carrel, lost, or on the reshelving cart. Old volumes could live out their days in safe and dignified retirement in climate-controlled book museums. And the librarians could run backups; look what happened to the Library of Alexandria, where they didn't do it. ..........— William John Mitchell (15 December 1944 – 11 June 2010), Australian-born architect, urban designer, and Dean of the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Recombinant Architecture" in Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution (1997) edited by Peter Droege. Quoted not so much because I am enamored of the scholar's farsightedness, although I am, but because I love the phrase, "the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow."