Library of Congress Summit of the Book

The Library of Congress is hosting two days of presentations on the future of the book. Yesterday's presentations were pretty interesting. One panel with the national librarians from five countries discussed their work in digitizing materials and the problems libraries in general faced in their countries.

I love one historian who discussed the early days of printing. She called it the standardization of errors (because scribes wouldn't make the same mistake over and over again). She also said there's nothing deader than a floppy disk, but the Gutenberg Bible (on display there) still works. She did say technology doesn't supplant, it supplements. Another speaker said people still want the sense of the book as object - they want to be able to smell it, drop it, etc.

My other favorite speaker talked about the history of law books. Wait, don't run away. She was brilliant and funny. She noted that custom is local and oral. Once it's written down, it can be moved from place to place, but it's not always a fit for other locations. She posted this slide from a 400-year old law book. The pointing hand is the equivalent of highlighting, but someone really didn't like their law professor:



Going to head over for the afternoon's lectures. Should be good.

Today's Christmas photo

I was walking along Constitution Avenue after the lectures and stopped to capture this. Everyone was down by the Ellipse for the lighting of the National Christmas tree, so it was pretty empty.