[GOAL] Standing at a point of transition: Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes

[Omega Alpha | Open Access]

Standing at a point of transition: Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes
<http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/standing-at-a-point-of-transition-johannes-trithemius-in-praise-of-scribes/>

In the August 2013 issue of the open access Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, Dorothea Salo has written a sumptuous satire, whose diabolical advice on how to dissuade an academic library from participating in changing the long-standing scholarly communication system nearly rivals that of Uncle Screwtape in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters>. (Salo herself points to Machiavelli and Swift as indirect inspirations.) “How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative” <http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss4/3/> is simultaneously entertaining and brutally insightful. ...

Much of the recently witnessed change in the scholarly communication system (and corresponding audacity of libraries to be involved) of which Salo speaks has been facilitated by the digital technology revolution. We are early enough into this revolution both to remember clearly where we’ve been and to see the outlines of where we might be heading coming into sharper focus. It does seem that there is something fundamentally different in the works this time around. It will no longer be just another incremental evolution of analog. This time it seems we may be looking at the effective (keyword) passing of analog itself.

We are standing at a technological transition point. Do we understand what we are experiencing? Do we know how we are supposed to feel? Should we be scared? Should we be excited? Both at once? With a propensity for drawing historical analogies for guidance (e.g., here <http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/reblog-plato-the-invention-of-writing-and-the-e-book/> and here <http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/reblog-when-youre-used-to-paper-rolls-it-takes-some-time-to-convert-to-turning-pages-of-a-book/>), I was attracted, in a decidedly non-satirical way, to the last part of this excerpt in Salo’s article ...

Your comments are welcome.

Gary F. Daught
Omega Alpha | Open Access
Advocate for open access academic publishing in religion and theology
http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com
oa.openaccess at gmail dot com
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