Sender: Rare Books and Special Collections Forum <EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.BITNET>
I am not so certain that the electronic age will provide every text in every
edition as you suggest. In fact, I expect that electronic publishing and the
role libraries will play in its dissemination will focus on journals and
current publications. Retrospective publishing will cover some materials, but
hardly will be omnivorous.
And I will be grateful for ubiquitous online access to standard editions. These
online libraries will serve the same purpose as the stacks do today: patrons
who want to see a copy of the Canterbury Tales will not come to see the
rare collection's Caxton (which will not be online). They will flip on
their terminal.
Is it too optimistic to argue that this new world will allow rare book
librarians to do more of what we do best: select, house and facilitate
access to books which are rare for so many reasons.
I am also worried by your analogy to museums. Perhaps I am biased because I
do not think of my subject driven collection as primarily dedicated to the
history of the book. Rather it is a vital collection of materials unavailable
in this concentration elsewhere and is a magnet for scholarship. The artifactual
aspect of the collection is interesting and valuable, but the primary value
of our books is their content (I admit to more pleasure handling a Jenson
incunable than a Scientia anastatic reprint of a 19th century edition).
Perhaps special collections which exist only to mirror the history of the
book will fall to predatory administrators, but strong subject driven
collections
are far more defendable. It is doubtful that the sorts of materials they have
will ever be reproduced on online systems.
Consider Chadwick-Healey's announced Patrologia latina project. Ignore that
in selecting the PL Chadwick-Healey has annointed an obsolete series of editions
Do you really think that when (if?) this vast body of medieval texts appears
on CD ROM or on networks that spontaneous combustion of either printed sets
of the PL or the many editions which came before and after of these texts
will occur?
I do not know what the future will bring. I do know that the sorts of books
in rare book collections will retain their importance for scholarship until
the millenium of universal access to every book, manuscript and archival
scribble occurs.