Radical Laboratory at the Border. No. 5.3.2007. 90.
Radical Laboratory at the Border between our Physical Past and Digital future. [Prelinger Library].
“Browsing the Post-Digital Library” [Prelinger Library] in Harper’s and Bad Subjects.
The Prelinger Library is featured in the May 2007 issue of Harper’s in “A World in Three Aisles” by Gideon Lewis-Krause.
Lewis-Krause, who admits to a fondness for books, notes that amateur experimental librarians Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger :
think the conflict between a so-called digital culture and a so-called print culture is fake.
He characterizes Megan Shaw Prelinger and Rick Prelinger as uneasy about the Alexandrian vision of horizonless repositories and the BLYTHE APPROACH OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES to Internet caches.
Classification pirouettes, associative refinement, the default to serendipity, celebrating context and a browsable narrative combine in this article to remind us why some of us became librarians in the first place.
While the Prelingers
love public libraries they see that they are increasingly like shopping malls with librarians relegated to being customer service technicians.
The article provides some unlovely snaps of
jealous librarians, but those many of us feel the same way and Megan and Rick.
“In 2004 my partner Rick and I built and opened our own library in San Francisco. After many years of intermittent development, the project took over a year of our lives and we began to make tangible our vision of a great and reasonably organized pile of resources that can inspire and enable thousands of projects.
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