Print Era Research Articles

From the Era of Print to the Reality of Electronic Publishing

Abstract In 1998, Michael Bowen summarized an ICSU Press workshop on electronic publishing [1]. It is reprinted below (in this issue of Chemistry International) and I have been invited to give a 2023 perspective on its conclusions. In 1998, Wendy Warr was chair of the IUPAC Committee on Printed and Electronic Publications (CPEP was the predecessor of the current CPCDS) and Mike Bowen was Secretary. It was an advisory function of the committee to keep-up with how the landscape of electronic publishing was evolving. Before I address those conclusions more specifically, it is worth mentioning some electronic publishing advances of the 1990s. Carnegie Mellon University advertised an opening for an “electronic librarian” as early as 1991. Some electronic products predate the World Wide Web (e.g., arXiv preprints which were first emailed using TeX in 1991). The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) was launched in October 1997. SpringerLink, Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, and PubMed were all available in 1998. The American Chemical Society (ACS) and Chemical Abstracts Service launched ChemPort in December 1997, in collaboration with seven other publishers. ACS had reinvented its journals for the Web with Articles as Soon as Possible (ASAP), search tools to find specific articles easily, and links to databases, and to cited articles through ChemPort. The scene was clearly set for electronic publishing, and so let’s move to the eight 1998 predictions from the ICSU Press workshop.

An Illustrated Haggadah for Sefardi Exiles in Istanbul

The first illustrated haggadah of the print era was published around 1505 by David and Samuel ibn Nahmias in Istanbul (henceforth “Istanbul Haggadah”). It was embellished with woodcuts that had been commissioned in 1492 in Naples. This paper approaches the Istanbul Haggadah as a cultural product of the early Sefardi Diaspora. A comparative iconographic method reveals idiosyncrasies in relation to the tradition of medieval manuscript haggadot, which are then contextualized within the cultural ambience of the early Sefardi Diaspora in Naples, where Don Isaac Abarbanel played a central role as a spiritual and communal leader. My analysis is based on three types of information and sources: Abarbanel’s post-expulsion writings, among others a commentary on the haggadah; book-historical data on the early phases of printing; and historical information on the lives of the refugees. Most Sefardi printing projects from the post-expulsion years were aimed at meeting the spiritual needs of the community of exiles. The Istanbul Haggadah, and particularly its illustration program, was a fitting compliment to these endeavors.

The End of the Print Era

Abstract By 2040, libraries will transit from viewing print books as the standard form for preservation to using digital editions as the copy of record. Libraries will pulp most of their print collections and retain mostly small special collections. Climate change and the resulting political and social instability will drive this transition, but there are potential gains for readers and research if we choose as libraries to pursue them.

The Issues with Journal Issues: Let Journals Be Digital Libraries

Science depends on a communication system, and today, that is largely provided by digital technologies such as the internet and web. Despite the fact that digital technologies provide the infrastructure for this communication system, peer-reviewed journals continue to mimic workflows and processes from the print era. This paper focuses on one artifact from the print era, the journal issue, and describes how this artifact has been detrimental to the communication of science, and therefore, to science itself. To replace the journal issue, this paper argues that scholarly publishing and journals could more fully embrace digital technologies by creating digital libraries to present and organize scholarly output.

Promoting Reading in the Era of Print and Pixels

Promoting Reading in the Era of Print and Pixels

Raising the Bar: How Chambers Librarianship has Risen to Twenty Years of Challenges

AbstractTwenty years ago the author, Alison Million, submitted an article to Legal Information Management (LIM) entitled ‘Of Barristers and Books’ which recounted her experiences of working as a librarian to barristers’ chambers in the era of print and CDs. The article brought her into contact with the Librarian of Inner Temple Library and together they founded the Bar Librarians’ Group to meet the interests of both Inn and Chambers Librarians. This article in 2022 recounts how the ensuing 20 years have brought very different challenges to Chambers Librarians in the online era and how the Bar Librarians’ Group works hard to resolve difficulties on behalf of LIS professionals serving the Bar.

The Formation of Ḥaredism—Perspectives on Religion, Social Disciplining and Secularization in Modern Judaism

This article proposes a reassessment of the development of Ḥaredism, that is, the application of strict, maximalist, commandment-oriented Judaism to increasingly large lay publics, in light of confessionalization processes in Europe. Whereas historiographical and sociological convention locates the sources of Ḥaredism within the development of 19th century orthodox Jewish responses to the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Reform, and secular Zionism, this article argues that Ḥaredi structures and practices preceded these movements, and, in some cases, influenced their development. The basis for the priority of Ḥaredi identities to Jewish secular identities is rooted in the social disciplining and religious engineering of Jewish societies in the early modern era, until just before the Haskalah, and beyond. This disciplining was predicated on the imposition of religious, social, and ascetic education systems on growing segments of the population. Ḥaredism as a concept and as a phenomenon emerged in 16th century Safed (Ottoman Palestine); there, previous Jewish ascetic patterns were reworked, reorganized and structured under the aegis of the print era, and became a basis for mass, super-regional education. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Ḥaredi religiosity steadily percolated through European Jewish societies by means of works of personal ethic and conduct that were written, printed, and reprinted many times, in Hebrew and Yiddish, through works that enumerate the commandments, and through popular works that make the Jewish halakhic code, Shulḥan Arukh, accessible to the masses by abridging or reworking it. Starting in the early 19th century, with the mediation of the Ḥasidic and Lithuanian religious movements, this process massively penetrated broad strata of society.

Reading Habit in the Internet Era*

The Internet and the digital revolution have deeply and sharply divided users into ‘digital immigrants’ and ‘digital natives’ with linguistic whateverism. The society is more image based than text and chat-based than reading. Reading habit is neither unambiguously definable nor accurately measurable. Proxy measures like book-buying, visiting, and borrowing from library, citations and downloads, self-reporting opinion is used to assess reading habit. Aliteracy is a predominant characteristic of the Internet era. The digital technology and the Internet have substantially affected the reading process as well as reading habit. Our ability to concentrate and read or think deeply is destroyed by digital distractions. It looks like there is a decline in reading habit due to the onslaught of electronic media. Despite increase in leisure time and income as well as considerable increase in expenditure on other forms of entertainment there is no corresponding increase in the expenditure on reading materials. The typical nature of digital reading as against print reading is characterized by convenience, devoting less time, reading shorter texts, impatience, etc, with certain values of online users as well as cognitive behaviour of students. There is a need for continuing the reading habit of print era in the digital era. Even in scholarly reading, it is imminent that the thoroughness of reading is sacrificed for speed and quantity as more and more read only shorter articles or abstracts.

Publishing Networks in France in the Early Era of Print

Publishing Networks in France in the Early Era of Print

Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, and the Universe of Thinkable Thoughts

Legal information has been available in widespread digital format for more than forty years. In that time, law librarians have wondered whether this digital switch has changed how law students and lawyers conduct research and, if so, what those changes are. Does legal research differ when conducted in print sources rather than computerized sources? What influence did the systems of organizing law in the print era have on the digital systems that followed? While we cannot put these questions to rest, we hope to shed some light on those differences by studying the work of lawyers and courts from the print era, the transition-to-digital era, and the digital era. Using a metric called “citation stickiness,” we studied how often parties to an appeal and the judges hearing that appeal agreed on the cases relevant to resolve the issues on appeal. This, we hoped, would also show whether there were perceptible differences in coherence and stability of the legal information landscape. Citation stickiness works like this: a citation is “sticky” if it appears in at least one party’s brief and then again in the court opinion. In an initial study of 325 federal court cases from 2017, 49% of the 7,552 cases that were cited in the courts’ opinions had been cited by at least one party in a brief. This study considers cases from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit decided in 1957, 1987, and 2017. After examining the citations in the briefs and opinions in our sample of cases, we compare our findings from the pre-digital era and from the digital era. What we learned surprised us.

From Manuscript to Print

This article takes the Nabivamsa—the first major work of Islamic doctrine to be written in Bangla, in the seventeenth century—as the basis for larger observations about Islamic Bangla literature and its transition from manuscript into print. The article charts three moments in the four centuries of the Nabivamsa’s textual life, reflecting on why such well-loved early modern religious texts fell into obscurity in the print era. The first phase from 1666 to 1777 marks the emergence and efflorescence of this literature, produced by Muslim intellectuals in the Cattagrama (Chittagong)-Arakan region. The second period, from 1777 onwards, is marked by the emergence of print as well as dobhasi Bangla in colonial Bengal. The third phase of this survey pertains to the constitution of a literary public sphere in Bengal linked to the momentum generated by print. This period saw the formulation of the Bangla literary canon through the efforts of publishers, literary critics, anthologists, translators, editors, historiographers and manuscript collectors. All of these were sustained through print’s cultural marketplace and the public discourses it engendered. The essay examines the ways in which Islamic Bangla literature’s value was articulated by the politics of archive-building and literary historiography central to the nationalist project.

Translating the Scribe: Lithographic Print and Vernacularization in Colonial India, 1857–1915

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.

Digital print in the material world: paratext in service of narrative

In the early 1990s, most large American publishing houses adopted desktop publishing software, creating an entirely digital book design and layout process. And no one noticed. To this day, only a few scholars have mentioned this fact, and there has been no significant consideration of the effect that desktop publishing has had on literature. This article considers how desktop publishing was employed in three twenty-first century novels: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2001), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). These novels are very different and employ desktop publishing software in different ways, showing the expansion of possibility in the era of digital print. Yet, all three also show a tendency to use the expanded typographic possibilities of digital technology to reinforce narrative and textual meaning, rather than to disrupt the workings of language or book traditions.

Impact of Electronic Information Resources on the Mindset of Researchers

The main purpose of the study in hand was to assess the impact of advent of electronic information resources on some core aspects related to the research activity across agricultural libraries of Northern India. Six aspects have been covered in this study. Seven sampled universities were surveyed personally by the investigator for collecting data about the questions under investigation. A questionnaire was used as a data collection tool. Filled out questionnaires from 1,200 respondents were collected and processed with the help of SPSS statistical package. The response of the users for each statement under investigation has been collected through a simple ‘Yes'/‘No' option. Chi squared test has been administered to work out the significance of association between the parameters under study and the user opinion thereof. The majority of respondents are of the opinion that due to advent of e-resources and in view of the ICT developments the ‘literature survey' (92.94%) and ‘problem identification' (51.81%) has become easy and fast. The ‘spirit to conduct more and more research' has increased among respondents (86.62%). Moreover, this has also enabled the users to ‘complete' (84.31%) and ‘publish' (89.97%) their research work in a lesser time than required in print era. A good percentage of respondents (46.26%) also agree that the ‘cross comparison of findings of one's study with those of other studies has become easy and fast' (46.26%) in electronic era.

The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean

In response to recent discussions of the possibility of writing global intellectual histories, this essay asks what that might involve for world regions beyond the West, particularly for ethnically and linguistically diverse areas that make up the necessarily complex units of analysis with which global historians must reckon. This methodological task is undertaken here by way of a case study of the Indian Ocean during the high tide of European colonization. Two dominant historiographical tropes are challenged to clear sufficient interpretive room for the variety of intellectual transactions across so heterogeneous a space. The first is the routine characterization of the Indian Ocean as an arena of “cosmopolitanism.” The second is the premise that oceanic actors operated under the intellectual hegemony of a “colonial episteme.” To test these claims, and widen the remit of what global intellectual history might mean, the focus here turns to the vernacular spheres of writing that rapidly widened in the era of print. Overall, the essay argues for understanding the Indian Ocean through an alternative conceptual framework of “vernacularism” and “heterotopia” that allows for the multiple intellectual trajectories of such world historical contact zones.

PERLINDUNGAN HUKUM TERHADAP JURNALIS WARGA YANG BERBASIS TEKNOLOGI INFORMASI

Along with the development of technology with the invention of the internet, the speed information cannot be blocked. Black list that occurredin the print era no longer applied when the era of information technology. The problem is, when it appears journalists from citizens namely the ordinary citizens who write news or facts in blogs or personal website, then it is exposed to public whether there is any protection for the journalist. These are problems that were examined in the article titled Legal Protection Against Journalists Citizen-Based Information Technology. The results of this study can be concluded that now everyone can write and submit his writings to the audience with ease. Currently in Indonesia citizen journalism grown fairly well. This is evidenced by the number of blogs that exist in Indonesia and made by the people of Indonesia. The existence of the blog has signaled that citizen journalism is a phenomenon that is in demand and will continue to grow in the community. The nature of citizen journalism that allows all internet users can enter information that he had through the Internet, can cause a state of some kind of 'abuse of power' by the accessor. The absence of clear boundaries about what should and should not be put on the internet has made sites and blogs contain information that should not be. Therefore it needs to be a rule in the special form of legislation on the protection of citizen journalists. Keywords : Legal Protection, Citizen J

The Increasing Reliance on Ritual Handbooks in Pre–Print Era Ashkenaz

Handbooks devoted to a single area of ritual practice figure prominently among the works produced by German Jews from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth. These handbooks include minhagim books intended primarily as liturgical guides for cantors and manuals for other types of communal functionaries, such as scribes and ritual slaughterers. Historians typically associate minhagim books with the post–Black Death period and the desire to provide guidance during a time of decline for German Jewry. Similarly, the flourishing of halakhic manuals is considered a fourteenth-century phenomenon, a result of the rabbinate’s professionalization. However, these explanations are insufficient since both genres emerged earlier. This article links the production of ritual handbooks to two trends: geographic mobility and a more text-oriented culture. Between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth, major changes in German Jewish settlement patterns disrupted the transmission of ritual practice and led to a need for practical guides. The proliferation of ritual handbooks was also related to the increase in Ashkenazic society—as in medieval Europe generally—in the production of written texts. These texts included liturgical genres and practical halakhic works, some of which served as sources for the handbooks. However, the handbooks tend to be more accessible than their predecessors and to include more practical details. The proliferation of late medieval ritual handbooks demonstrates that changes typically associated with the advent of print, including a growing reliance on written sources for practical information and a move toward the standardization of ritual practice, began to emerge in earlier centuries.

Leveraging Author-Supplied Metadata, OAI-PMH, and XSLT to Catalog ETDs: A Case Study at a Large Research Library

Most academic theses and dissertations are now born-digital assets (i.e., electronic theses and dissertations). As such, they often coexist with author-supplied metadata that has the potential for being repurposed and enhanced to facilitate discovery and access in an online environment. The authors describe the evolution of the electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) cataloging workflow at a large research library, from the era of print to the present day, with emphasis on the challenges and opportunities of harvesting author-supplied metadata for cataloging ETDs. The authors provide detailed explanations of the harvesting process, creating code for the metadata transformations, loading records, and quality assurance procedures.

Hyperlinks & Copyright Law

Reconciling the desire for wide distribution with the desire for control has proven challenging for the law. Deep linking is a good illustration of how applying print and broadcast era concepts to the challenges of the digital era can result in uncertainty and unintended consequences. In the Svennson decision, the court not only failed to acknowledge the distinction between linking and embedding, but it explicitly permitted embedding of content from other sites. This could have implications for how content is distributed, and may ultimately harm user privacy.

Library resource discovery.

Library resource discovery.