Friday, March 12, 2004

Every Book Digital? Book Scanning Machine. There is a neat article in USA Today about a book scanning machine that scans 1200 pages an hour without damaging the book. From the article, "This process is actually gentler on books than the human hand." Article is here. [LISNews.com] This article caught my eye because I marveled at this machine when I saw it at ALA in January. It's an amazing piece of engineering, and I'm not surprised that the Library of Congress is considering buying one, as the article claims. It seems that it would be useful to any institution that is concerned about preserving fragile and decaying ancient documents. What worries me, however, is the other part of this article that refers to Amazon digitizing all the books in its inventory. Here we go again with the idea that printed books will soon disappear. On the other hand, I recognize the potential for research. So what bothers me about this? Maybe it's the trend toward letting computers and search engines do all the thinking for us -- all the information is there and just needs to be gathered up. That's a very seductive trend for young people who should be learning to think carefully and critically on their own. 12:48:58 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Deborah Wells-Clinton. Last update: 4/13/04; 8:25:18.