This edited volume is a tightly organized and consistently stimulating foray into the implications of technological changes for libraries and archives. The contributors do an excellent job taking what is by now the well-established cliché of the book’s title—the “digital age”—and reminding us of its manifold meanings. Why, after all, do we speak so much of the “digital age” rather than, say, the “computer age” or the “Internet age”? Interestingly, the Google Books Ngram Viewer shows within its corpus that “computer age” still appeared slightly more frequently as late as 1996, only after which point in time did “digital age” genuinely begin to skyrocket in usage. Even the clunkier “age of digital” has exceeded the frequency of the “Internet age” for the past fifty and more years. Clearly, we are drawn to the language of the “digital.” Reading this collection of essays helps to establish why: as an adjective, “digital” describes an extraordinarily wide and ever-dynamic range of things and processes. It had never been as apparent to this reviewer, at least, why “digital age” always seemed the more apt reference, and it is only the most obvious of many take aways from this book that the digital age remains full of both challenges and opportunities for the world of libraries and archives.The volume originated in the inaugural conference of Boston University’s Center for the Humanities, co-sponsored by the Boston Public Library and the Boston Athenaeum. As editor Susan Mizruchi writes in the introduction, the gathering was conceived as a “forum” in the classical sense, but also as something more inclusive: “The divergent life experiences, professional training, and approaches of our contributors will, we hope, result in a volume that is unique to the field” (1). The collaboration of three distinct institutions—academic research center, public library, and independent library—was an intentional effort to create a partnership to spark and support far-reaching professional dialogue. “We hope,” Mizruchi writes, “that this book will initiate a broader global conversation among representatives of a wide range of institutions, disciplines, and professional capacities, on subjects of profound cultural and political importance” (3). Mizruchi is director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities, and it should be noted that the Center’s website still provides visitors with the forum’s archived schedule and related materials, including archived audio recordings of several presentations and Q&As (more on which below).The book is organized into four parts with the following titles: (1) “Access”; (2) “Preservation and Community”; (3) “Archival Politics”; and (4) “Digital Practice.” All of the authors are very successful in situating their individual contributions within the collection as a whole, frequently citing one another and thus continuing through the printed word the discussions one imagines to have first been prompted by the event itself. The flow from one chapter to the next—the “intertextuality” of the essays, if you will—is a distinct strength here and deserves special mention, since on other occasions conference proceedings can be quite fragmentary in nature. It seems evident that the event was carefully planned, laying the groundwork for the many thoughtful conversations taking place across these printed pages.A major theme to emerge in the first part of the book, “Access,” is the state of open access. Robert Darnton frames the question by reaching back to the Enlightenment idea of a “republic of letters” (17). “The battles over journal prices,” he states, citing recent examples of subscription costs increasing well beyond the rate of inflation, “illustrate a conflict between two tendencies that will determine the digital future: democratization versus commercialization” (18). Against this backdrop, Darnton recounts the creation and mission of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), in which he played a key part. He acknowledges the complexity of the situation he describes, but he remains more of an optimist than others. “Now that we have entered the digital age,” he notes, “we can do better. We can make all of the material in all of our research libraries available to everyone free of charge. That is the basic idea behind the Digital Public Library of America” (19). Daniel J. Cohen proposes that the term “open access” itself has lost rhetorical power and “is showing its age” (27). He suggests thinking in terms of “maximal access” instead (27 and passim), shifting our focus from the “supply side” to the “demand side” of digital resources (28). “How,” he asks, “can we have audiences fully engage with library and archival materials, including collections of greatest relevance to their communities” (28)? Thought-provoking contributions to this part of the volume are also made by Alberto Manguel discussing the National Library of Argentina and Jack Ammerman reflecting (in the voice of moderator for this part of the original gathering) on some of the broader themes of access already raised by the other contributors.Part 2, “Preservation and Community,” touches on timely questions of archival power and practice. Ellen Cushman considers the role of translation to and from the languages of Indigenous peoples in the decolonization of digital archives, focusing specifically on the Cherokee language. “Decolonial translation,” she writes, “reveals the boundaries created by the imperial difference in an effort to include again the knowledges which have been lost or erased—to restore suppressed epistemologies” (58). Cushman’s vision for a decolonial digital archive is collaborative—a “collective endeavor” (64). As she states, “decolonial translation processes seek to develop meaningful interactions with text from a variety of perspectives, honoring equally the knowledge of the language speaker, translator, learner, scholar, and archivist” (64). Also in this part of the book are fascinating essays by Jeanette A. Bastian on community archives—which “offer a way to reach beyond traditional archival institutions that are often viewed as exclusive and exclusionary” (74)—and by Fallou Ngom on the impact of digital technologies on preserving and providing access to archives from sub-Saharan Africa of written materials in non-European languages, especially in Arabic and in languages based on Ajami scripts, which are ‘enriched forms of the classical Arabic script’ (83). As Ngom writes, “Digital technology has made possible the preservation, study, and dissemination of previously overlooked sources of knowledge that force revisions of various aspects of academic discourses on precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Africa” (99).Parts 3 and 4, “Archival Politics” and “Digital Practice,” respectively, are likewise full of interesting and insightful case studies on the implications of digital technologies and networks for libraries and archives. The range of places, types of materials, and topics covered is refreshingly wide; in part 3 it encompasses (authors noted in parentheses) examinations of microfilmed photographs of Indigenous peoples of Brazil held in a Paris archive (Beatriz Jaguaribe), the archiving of Chinese websites by Heidelberg University in Germany (Rudolf G. Wagner), the role of human rights archives in Latin America after the Cold War (Kirsten Weld), and a philosophical reflection on all three of the preceding that ultimately asks, “What are the limits of your information? How much can you repair it? What can you make—and not make—of your archive?” (Maurice S. Lee, 177).The final part of the collection then offers the book’s most direct considerations yet of digital scholarship, or, in other words, of the computational methodologies usually understood to be part of the digital humanities. Here, Harriett E. Green, Vika Zafrin, and Alan Liu all provide sharp takes on the questions put forward by Mizruchi at the outset, including how to balance the preservation of physical materials with “the opportunities afforded by digital methods” (2). In answering that question, Green calls on librarians who combine both theory and practice in their work, and who are “both learners and teachers” (191). That is certainly one of several appealing takeaways with which the book leaves us.This is a terrifically instructive and intriguing set of essays, for which the archived conference website—alluded to above and available at https://www.bu.edu/humanities/fall-forum/forum-2017/—furnishes a parting thought. The detailed conference schedule and audio recordings that have all been preserved there are a great resource in and of themselves. The book appears not to highlight the existence or availability of the site, but, as a key challenge of digital technology for libraries and archives remains linking up otherwise disparate and disconnected pieces of information, I mention it here for anyone who is interested, and as a reminder from the published volume of Alberto Manguel’s concise and fitting remark: “A valid definition of a library is a place that always exceeds the space you give it” (42).