Proliferating Ephemera in Print and Digital Media

In january 2011, late-night host david letterman marked the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia by announcing that the world is about to implode. At that time, the idea of graduate students messing up Wikipedia entries was so commonplace it was a bit of a cliché: the kind of thing that Sheldon, Leonard, and the boys would do for fun on a Saturday night. Letterman humorously insisted that the predictable result of all the misinformation that is circulating and re-circulating thanks to Wikipedia and other popular crowd-sourced content providers is that we will eventually find ourselves without any concrete facts left to stand on: an information implosion of sorts.

Five years later, the Wikipedia model has become more or less normalized. Today, it seems that making has more social capital than knowing, and the sprawling digital universe seems to ask us to put less stock in quality than in quantity, or influence, as measured by views, likes, or citations. In the Postinformation Age, content-of-uncertain-quality proliferates and sometimes exerts remarkable influence. And just where does all this content come from? It comes from all of us. Whether or not we think of ourselves as artists or experts, we are always already positioned as makers, as reviewers, and as content providers.

I am fascinated by the quality problems that this model creates, both as a researcher, seeking quality content, and as a contributor who has fewer and fewer options for distinguishing between my own expert and non-expert contributions. I will get back to these issues later, but for now I am going to set aside questions about quality and speak to you less as a critic than as a book historian, a bibliographer, and a special collections librarian. In this hat, I am interested in the material nature of the digital content that today is proliferating exponentially.

I am a teaching librarian in a rare book library at University of Alberta, so it may surprise you that I want to talk to you about digitization. It may also surprise you to learn that the proliferation of digital surrogates of primary, historical, and foundational documents in virtually every field of study has led to renewed interest in studying the original print documents not just in the humanities but in the sciences as well. With this comes the more urgent need to understand the conditions and historical contexts of print production. This is one of the many ways in which digital formats have opened up new areas of research and teaching in almost every discipline. As an aside, it has also led to an exponential increase in the demand for my time, so much so that I can only accommodate a small percentage of the hundreds of class requests I routinely receive from professors each year.

Although my primary function is to teach book history as it relates to the print objects housed in special collections, increasingly I find myself—of necessity—addressing a wide range of misconceptions about the sprawling digital universe. For one thing, a lot of people observe the rapid proliferation of digital content and exaggerate it beyond all reason. It is not uncommon for students, and occasionally for professors, to imagine that all print materials—especially older materials—have been, or soon will be, digitized by libraries or by scholarly projects. Simply put, the digitization of rare and fragile materials is complex and expensive, and libraries simply don't have the resources to digitize more than a tiny percentage of the most frequently used materials. Quite aside from an exaggerated sense of how quickly digital surrogates of print materials are proliferating, an even bigger misconception relates to the life cycle of digital content. People seem to understand that their own devices quickly become outdated and may even be aware of the large number of dead links on the Internet, but people seem to imagine a very long life for digital content, whether it is born digital or it has been digitized from print.

The truth is that digital technologies change so rapidly that e-books and other forms of e-content...