What is the research library in the age of Google? Dr. Anthony Grafton provides the perspective of a humanist scholar on recent changes in research libraries that have been brought about by increased digitization. By examining changes that have occurred over the last forty years in the way that scholars conduct their research and where the library fits in, Grafton sees four crises that today’s academic libraries must face: financial, spatial, use, and accessibility. According to Professor Grafton, a research library should provide not only physical space where scholars can pursue research in books, but also virtual space where they can collect, store, and exploit electronic resources – an ingenious way to pull humanists, teachers, and students alike back into public workspace, in an environment that has the open, collective quality of a laboratory, but also meets the needs of researchers who work with texts, images, and sounds. This talk was hosted by Green College as part of its Cecil H. and Ida Green Visiting Professor lecture series on March 20, 2013 at the Victoria Learning Theatre (Room 182), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Reference:
Grafton, Anthony. “Apocalypse in the stacks? The research library in the age of Google.” Daedalus 138.1 (2009): 87-98. [Link]
Speaker Bio
Professor Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His current project is a large-scale study of the science of chronology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe: how scholars attempted to assign dates to past events, reconstruct ancient calendars, and reconcile the Bible with competing accounts of the past. He hopes to reconstruct the complex and dramatic process by which the biblical regime of historical time collapsed, concentrating on the first half of the 17th century. He has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on art, magic, and science in Renaissance Europe and on the history of books and readers; undergraduate seminars on historiography; and the history components of the intensive four-course introduction to Western civilization offered to undergraduates by the Program in Humanistic Studies.
Are you interested in viewing more Irving K. Barber Learning Centre webcasts? Please find here for our archived recordings.