Library and Museum

(Jose, you do know that thousands of residents from Cary and Mebane would not fit on the two sites involved in this discussion, right?  Hyperbole, I assume.) Otherwise, your attitude toward print culture and history is well known to me and others. I've given seminars and classes in the relationships between old and new media, and between print and non-print media, but I'd have a little trouble summarizing here all the reasons why it's nutty to presume that ALL information storage and communication henceforth will be and should be exclusively electronic.  There are things electronic media do very well, much better than print on paper or chisel on stone would.  This constitutes the kind of "progress" that's the only way to keep up with the mushroom clouds of information that now dominate our lives.  A lot of contemporary life depends on the presumption of an uninterruptedly open net, endless power sources, and protected e-communication. But there are things that - for various reasons, including what people feel most comfortable with and what corporations make the most profit on - will continue to work better in other forms.  It doesn't detract from recognizing the utility of newer electronic technologies to understand and accept the concurrent continuation of older "technologies" with differing functions.  It's not an either-or proposition.  But if you expect civic support for one and deny it to the other, you're missing some major issues.As to maintaining the records and artifacts of history, it's easy to dismiss them as useless and meaningless until, oh say, you get audited by the IRS, your child wants to know who her greatgrandmother was, or you decide you want to write a book/blog about old vs. new media and there's no old media around to look at.   Yup, more and more is being "stored" in digitized form but a lot isn't and may well never be. Everytime this reverse Luddite attitude surfaces - get rid of the old, only accept that consecrated-to-the-new - it reminds me of what happened to British libraries during the Reformation.  Some of the most critical documents and archives were burned, and the remainder survived largely thanks to the Jesuit librarians.

1. If both "ordinary" books and e-books had been invented on the same day, they would have ended up serving different functions, although in 1910 electricity wasn't extensively available. We didn't lose books when radio came along, we didn't lose radio or film when TV came along - we shifted around our preferences and habits depending on economics and effectiveness.  Movies serve a different purpose from TV, despite considerable duplication and overlap in content and production. 2. Periodicals with transient information such as Consumer Reports are very good candidates for electronic media. So are phone books, newspapers (I'm sad to concede), and scientific journals; and encyclopedias have disappeared entirely with considerable justification. Archival, historic, and art books work much better on paper, with ink.  As for trade fiction and non-fiction, I honestly think they can go both ways, depending on how long someone wants to keep them and whether the owner wants to write in the margins (sorry, doing that on e-text is very clumsy), wrap it up to give to a friend, or have it to read when the power grid fails. Don't expect Barnes & Noble to go away anytime soon, and take a look sometime at the shelves devoted to electronic communication.  People keep writing books - published on ink and paper - discussing things like electronic communication and how books are going to die . . . 3. Information stored electronically lasts only as long as 1) it's not expunged or altered, 2) the encoding format is standard, 3) people have standardized hardware to access it, and 4) the network used for access is not controlled by third-parties such as governments or corporations.  There's a reason I print out drafts of important documents.  And there's a reason serious researchers look for primary materials rather than digitized facsimiles.4. Finally, there is a substantial environmental cost to the production, powering, and disposal of electronic-text hardware; appealing to supposed liberal/environmental sensitivities re: killing trees (the horror, the horror) because of their stubborn refusal to accept new technology just doesn't wash.  

What are people's thoughts about having a library branch at the University Mall?   Mine:  1. That it adds a peculiar but possibly welcome dimension to the tension between the severe upscaling of the rest of the Mall and the endurance of Roses; 2. That it may bring in the foot traffic lost when Kerr Drug left - and increase the community sense, which is a Good; but 3. Why couldn't some of the museum's treasures also become part of the Mall community environment?(Jose, I despair of convincing you that when New arrives, it does not necessarily nor even desirably completely replace Old, especially in the realm of technology.  Rather than a mutually exclusive binary relationship, there's usually adaptation, synthesis, or re-ordering.  In fact, it's often the case that when Old is completely jettisoned, something important is lost, to the detriment of the future --  the Beta versions of all sorts of things are often good examples.  We can certainly embrace the New, but it doesn't definitionally require wholesale discard of the Old.  )