Hello. This is Jackson Ossea.
Like most of my
classmates, I’m also a bibliophile with the professional ambition of becoming a
librarian. It wasn’t a career I initially had in mind when I was completing my
undergrad in Film Studies, but I soon discovered that it would be the best
place for where my then current knowledge could best compliment the skillset I
could obtain as a Master of Information student.
This
wasn’t a decision which came from hours of hemming and hawing over what to do
with a film degree if I couldn’t get a job in the industry but from the choice
to expand my horizons, and to discern which career would be the most rewarding
through the development of new and malleable skills. It led me to discovering
the principles of Library and Information Science (LIS) and the increasingly
growing – if at times controversial
– academic field of digital humanities. I was fascinated by how this discipline
could act as a bridge between the traditionalists who would not accept anything
which isn’t on paper and those who are much keener to embrace digital
technologies within academia.
I
aim to continue pursuing my curiosities and academic ambitions through this
course, The Future of the Book. I don’t think that I’ve ever taken the Ray Bradbury position of a Luddite when it comes to the presence of digital
technology, but I certainly used to be sceptical of e-readers and the fissure
they have created amongst readers – challenging how many of us will read
literature in the future. I believed that the only way in which I could
properly absorb a book was in its traditional paper form with the physical
touching of the pages and the object being properly bound together with its
spine. These ideas came to me after my frustrating attempts to read e-books on
my laptop, especially the books which were made available through Google Books
and Project Gutenberg such as Oliver
Twist and The Pilgrim’s Process
which were made available in their entirety for free because they had fallen
out of copyright. Finding that reading
e-books was causing more headaches than anything else, I became dumbfounded as
to how this format had found so many vocal defenders in academic and commercial
circles.
I’ve
now had my e-reader – a Kobo Aura – for more than a year now and it’s turned
out to be my favourite gizmo. I haven’t abandoned the hardcover and paperback
books which populate the shelves of my bedroom and basement, I now read many more
novels and academic texts digitally than I did before and I don’t think that practice
is likely to change. My device changed the way in which I experience books, by
allowing me that insight that the form of the object was not necessarily the
most relevant aspect of how I gained access to information and narratives.
Still,
I don’t think that my new(er) position is by any means permanent. I look
forward to the debates which will take place between my peers over what will
become of the objects which made us want to become librarians in the first place,
as well as the more pragmatic part of the course which will further develop my
skillset as a future professional. I have no previous experience with XML, or
any markup language for that matter, so I look forward to becoming more
involved with the process through which digital texts are created and how XML
needs to be employed for e-books.
No comments:
Post a Comment