The library world feels depaysé today, and rightly so. Both of its physical entities, the buildings and the books they contain, can no longer form the basis for planning. And the curatorial function has metamorphosed, to borrow a phrase from an archivist acquaintance, "from curatorial to interpretive." Librarians of electronic information find their job now a radically rhetorical one - they must consciously construct human attention-structures rather than assemble a collection of books according to commonly accepted rules. They have, perhaps unwillingly, found themselves transported from the ancillary margin of the human sciences to their center. If this be so - and can it be doubted? - how should we train librarians, much less plan the building where they will work? Maybe the novelty of the challenge explains why the number of master of library science degrees awarded in the last ten years has fallen by 50 percent.
  • Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts
  •  What happens when text moves from page to screen? First, the digital text becomes unfixed and interactive. The reader can change it, become writer. The center of Western culture since the Renaissance - really since the great Alexandrian editors of Homer - the fixed, authoritative, canonical text, simply explodes into the ether.
  • Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts

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