Well… I hope so.
I feel like I’ve finished the test flight on this blog — a few articles up, no major crises, a few interesting emails from readers.
Time to turn on commenting. You can now comment on articles, and comment on comments. Please do. Constructively. And yes, you need to submit comments with name and email — there are other places for public, anonymous rants, and other ways to send me private, anonymous slams. Please express your thoughts here, honestly, AND constructively.
Everything is not digital. In fact less and less is. Digitization is slowing down and according to recent surveys patrons and consumers prefer print.
From Murrell, M. (2017) Out of print: the Orphans of Mass Digitization Current Anthropology, v.58 suppl. 15 p.149-159 :
“Books in Suspension
After the rejection of the settlement to Authors Guild et al. v.
Google in March 2011, mass book digitization began its slow
end. Despite being well short of its original goal to digitize “all
books in all languages” as well as its pledge to digitize the
entirety of the University of Michigan’s libraries, Google quietly
moved away from the project. Scanning capacity was
drastically cut in 2011; the Google Books blog was discontinued
in 2012; its Twitter feed went silent in 2013; and its staff
left or was reassigned. The company continues to scan books,
but, according to its partners, its efforts are confined to the
public domain, as was the state of play in 2004 before all the
brouhaha and lawsuits, when the company so shocked people
with its audacious pledge to digitize not just public domain
books but “all books in all languages.” Like Google, the Internet
Archive continues to digitize some books, but the staff
devoted to it has dispersed. As Kahle told me, the organization
had “thrown itself” at mass digitization in order keep library
collections from being commodified, and, after the defeat of
the settlement, he decided that that investment had largely
paid off and it was time to turn his organization’s efforts to the
many other pressing challenges of web archiving.”