Quote of the day

[gwynraven]

"Technology should be a familiar subject to us, after all; it lies at the heart of printing and book history. The most recent revolution, dazzling as it may appear in its purported transformation of how we pursue knowledge and communicate with each other, is only the third of three. The first technological revolution, the invention of writing, continues to dwarf in importance both the development of moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century and the reconstruction of the world in bits and bytes near the close of the twentieth. A digitized image of a medieval manuscript or early modern book may both widen and sharpen the educational process, but it cannot wholly substitute for the experience of learning from those whose job it is to pass on their hard-earned knowledge of how and why these cultural artifacts were made. Similarly, the growth of "content" on the web, extraordinary as it is, makes the interpretation of so much information all the more crucial. In the long run, there is still much to be said for the primal encounter between critical judgment, on the one hand, and the full spectrum of cultural production in all of its formats, on the other."

-- Richard Wendorf, The Scholar-Librarian: Books, Libraries, and the Visual Arts