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  • The Dark Side of Digitization
  • Emily Walshe (bio)

Like many families this year, ours has enjoyed a romance with the Star Wars saga. Enveloped in Dolby Digital and anamorphic widescreen, I have watched our children's imaginations orbit around the epic's prequels, sequels, and bonus features. While negotiating the remote throughout this courtship, I observed a phenomenon in our living room that is parallel to my experience in the academic library.

The children will seek me out, disk in hand, and request to view a particular scene—predictably, excerpt 39 of a 50-chapter adventure. Somehow in their fertile little minds, chapter 39 has come to represent the entire film. What the children continue to ask for is the climax scene—a climax devoid of context. There is no prelude, no development, and no denouement; for them, the snippet is the story.

Increasingly, such is the undergraduate encounter with digital library resources. As a reference librarian, I have puzzled over this idea in recent semesters, entertaining the innocently posited query, "How do I cite an abstract?" I've reasoned in the past that this inclination toward the abstract probably has more to do with access (or lack of) than aptitude. But lately, I am beginning to think that these requests might more accurately reflect a pervasive habit of mind in contemporary culture—a preference for the abridgement, highlight, or thumbnail.

To "abstract" means to extract or withdraw. In the library world, this practice is done in an attempt to describe a document's content so that the prudent researcher might determine its relevancy to the course of inquiry. When UMI published Dissertation Abstracts, this was generally the idea. The information contained in the abstract was commonly sought simply because access to the dissertation itself might be cumbersome or costly. The abstract became the document's "surrogate," serving as a point of reference. [End Page 491]

With the proliferation of periodical databases, students have immediate subject access to journal literature online and, curiously, are not going any further than the descriptive surrogate. That extra step in retrieval (if you completed your dissertation, you know how time-consuming this step can be) to schlep to the periodicals room, weed through microforms, and retrieve the article is looked upon as wholly unnecessary. For many students, consulting the full text rather than its abstract is equivalent to using an eight-track over an iPod—why suffer through an entire album for one or two good songs? Even with numerous full-text databases, providing not only instantaneous access to articles but also intellectually appealing mechanisms with which to search and manipulate their text, students continue to point and click on the abstract. With this practice, I remain perplexed. Instead of directing a course of inquiry, abstracts are now eclipsing it.

This emerging preference for the surrogate puts a whole new spin on library work. To what exactly are students referring? In the printed realm, the abstract is provided to the reader in the header of an actual study. In an online database, however, the abstract opens in a new window, wholly detached from its parent. Thanks to swift and sophisticated taxonomies in indexing, we can exploit the part in an attempt to apprehend its whole. Anything analogous (read: fluid, extended) in the research experience is lost in pointed digital delivery. In the worst cases, research papers become assemblages of abstracts. Original thought is never consulted, nor conceived, in the process.

The conceptual separation between finger and fingerprint is obscure in a ubiquitous digital domain. This is evident in many facets of contemporary life, not just libraries. For example, my cell phone rings and pumps out a few chords of a Bach minuet. Without ever having heard a Bach minuet in its mature form, I can nevertheless identify it by the distinctive characteristics of its abbreviated pattern. We are in an age ruled by the economies of time and attention, in which—even with access to the real thing—availability of its encapsulated form compels us.

I have discussed this idea with a colleague of mine who has witnessed a similar trend in the classroom. She suggests that recent deference to the abstract is reflective...

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