Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gvh9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T16:07:18.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Slow Digitisation and the Battle of the Books

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2020

Get access

Summary

The battle facing the books today has nothing to do with arguments between Plato and Aristotle or Paganism and Christianity: it has to do with the survival of the books themselves.

Robin Alston

Among the colleagues during the twenty years I worked at the British Library who profoundly influenced me was the historian of the English language, bibliographer and librarian, Robin Alston (1933–2011). Robin's great scholarly achievement was his twenty-volume Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800, but the range of his achievements and interests stretched far beyond this. While he was a lecturer at the University of Leeds, he founded Scolar Press to provide cheap facsimiles of historical and literary texts for his students. As editor- in-chief of the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, which afterwards became the English Short Title Catalogue or ESTC, Robin profoundly influenced the way in which we use printed books from the hand press period. Robin's insistence that this new catalogue should be machine readable and his energy in driving forward the ESTC laid the foundations of such current digital resources as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth- Century Collections Online. Robin was one of the pioneers who shaped the modern digital research environment for humanities scholars.

In 1990, Robin was appointed Professor of Library and Information Studies at University College London, and he gave his inaugural lecture at UCL, entitled ‘The Battle of the Books’, on 16 February 1993. I attended, with many others from the British Library. The atmosphere was electric.

Robin was known as a charismatic, entertaining and thought-provoking lecturer who provided remarkable insights into current and future developments. He did not fail on this occasion. Robin took his starting point Jonathan Swift's satire, A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St James's Library, appended to the Tale of a Tub (1704). Swift imagined the books in the Royal Library joining in the conflict between those who revered classical learning and those who stressed the need for up-to-date modern learning. Swift described solitary volumes of classical learning being threatened by the massed ranks of thousands of modern books.

Type
Chapter
Information
Slow Scholarship
Medieval Research and the Neoliberal University
, pp. 143 - 162
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×