Daunting Tasks & Compounding Distances

I came away from this week’s readings wondering what it is about ‘the digital’ that seems to preclude the “whimsical, associative order” (Manguel, 197) and “surprising juxtapositions” (Kissane) of (certain) physical libraries. Is it something inherent to the digital form? There’s also the other side of the question – Megan Shaw Prelinger argues that part of what makes the experiences of a physical library irreproducible is the immensely difficult task of digitizing physical collections, though she does not refute the possibility of creating more associative digital library experiences (Kissane). Is it merely the daunting task of digitization that has kept us from creating more surprising, whimsical digital libraries, or have we been restricted by normative assumptions about the digital and what we can do with it?

This is not simply a digital problem – it is also infrastructural. I was struck by BookOps’ suggestion that it doesn’t serve the Queens Library in part because Queens has the “furthest to come to align its systems and operations with those of the other libraries” (Mattern). As with digitizing physical collections, is the task of updating the Queens Library’s infrastructures so difficult as to be unfeasible; so extensive as to be unworthy of even incremental changes? Shouldn’t the fact that it already has the “furthest to come” make it a priority for updates? That distance will only compound with increasing speed and intensity. 

One Reply

  • Thank you, Layne. Another masterfully synthetic post. This question about digital whimsy — is there something formal, phenomenological, infrastructural, etc. about digital collections and interfaces that precludes serendipity? — has come up in several of your classmates’ posts, so I have a feeling this will be a primary theme of discussion tomorrow! And I appreciate your reminding us that all that digital magic depends on the very un-magical labor of updates and migrations and other maintenance tasks.

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