On Life In Information

My previous post was triggered by the announcement of Princeton’s new bookless library. It embodies what is possibly a widely-shared opinion in educational circles today that there is no need for books because students have the vast treasures of the Internet at their fingertips. Why limit them to what’s between the covers of old technology, when the new one offers so much more knowledge and diversity of opinions?

Today’s Ideas section of the Boston Globe features an article by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow summarizing

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On June 13, 1894, J.W. Clark, the Registrary of Cambridge University, delivered a lecture titled “Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods.” Clark exhorted his audience to rise above the disdain, typical of the period, of “ancient” modes of thought. “The more we study what [our forefathers] did,” he said, “the more we shall realise how laborious, how artistic, how conscientious they were; and amid all the developments of the nineteenth century, we shall gratefully confess that the Middle Ages rocked the cradle of our knowledge.”

Clark posited to his Cambridge audience two library models: The Workshop and The Museum.

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