<b>Library Assessment Workgroup (Lesley University).</b> <i>Faculty Information and Research Needs: A Qualitative Study of Lesley University and Episcopal Divinity School Faculty</i>. Cambridge, Mass.: Lesley University Library, 2013. 126p. Available online at http://ir.flo.org/lesley/fileDownloadForInstitutionalItem.action?itemId=2096&itemFileId=2101.
Author(s) -
Anders Selhorst
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
college and research libraries
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.886
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 2150-6701
pISSN - 0010-0870
DOI - 10.5860/0740622
Subject(s) - workgroup , divinity , sociology , library science , theology , computer science , philosophy , computer network
copies from laboriously hand-produced tracings to mechanized routines. By the mid-century, it had become possible to marry the two, and photolithography began to make more or less faithful copies of old books accessible to a wider and wider public. While fastidious readers will disdain such copies, McKitterick correctly notes how the availability of old books in facsimile form helped increase their value and regard as cultural objects. Which leads to the final section of this excellent monograph: public exhibitions. If you have a copy, if you value the copy, would you not prize seeing the original even more? Before the rise of public museums in the 19th century, it would have been hard for anyone other than scholars, collectors, and booksellers to actually see old books. That began to change with regular displays at the great national museums and libraries in Paris and London in the 19th century, and then more broadly. The prestige of old books soared as culturally esteemed objects, an observation that culminates in McKit-terick's book in two happy outcomes: the huge and important Caxton exhibition of 1877 in South Kensington and the parallel creation of what essentially became the modern bibliography that continues to inform praxis and scholarship today. The Caxton exhibition brought into one location some 5,000 books and manuscripts, and it did so in a way that reflected a new, historically and technically grounded appreciation of the relationship between the processes of making books and the books themselves. The exhibition thus both enshrined Caxton and printing in the national British epic of freedom, commerce, and Protestantism, while also giving birth to modern study of antiquarian books. Fittingly, the dust jacket of McKitterick's book is an 1877 engraving of " Caxton shewing the first specimen of his printing to King Edward IV & the royal family in the abbey of Westminster, 1477. " But this happy ending is not, of course, the end. The books in our special collections bear the marks of their own, individual histories—even where all evidence of " historicity " has been deliberately erased, effaced, or otherwise eliminated. They have been and will be valued differently at different times by different groups of people. The old books in McKitterick's narrative are often as much the victims of love and care as they are of neglect, indifference , or—worse—of mischief. While technological inventions play a major role in McKitterick's story, technology only …
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