Saturday, September 07, 2013

Let's save Shakespeare's folios, but the play's the thing – the Bard is online to

It's possible to make digital versions of the folios Senate House wants to sell at a high enough resolution to see every blot of ink

Shakespeare
A 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare's plays. Now such works can be seen in digital versions. Photograph: Sang Tan/AP

The unanimous outcry that has greeted the revelation that London University's Senate House Library plans to sell off four of its prized Shakespeare folios will, hopefully, guarantee that their proposed auction at Bonhams in November will no longer go ahead. The fact that the folios were left to the library in 1960 by Sir Louis Sterling with the strict proviso that they remain "permanently housed in the university library" should have been enough to kill the idea before it ever reached the desk of the library's beleaguered director, Christopher Pressler.

But that the finest lending library in London, with more than 30,000 users consulting three million volumes, should choose to even consider such a move suggests that the function of university research libraries, and with it the object it has housed for so long, the physical book, is changing.


Behind the sale lies a more prosaic problem faced by all of us in the humanities. Senate House Library is in trouble: as part of a wider library funding crisis, its public revenue was axed in 2010, and it is struggling to define itself as part of a slowly disintegrating London University federal system.


Many students – my own included – are accessing information through virtual learning environments (VLEs), and often turn up to seminars with tablets and laptops rather than texts and photocopied articles. They are now able to search and analyse texts like Shakespeare's in online open-access editions (many of them created by the senior academics currently decrying the sale of the folios). The work they produce is original and exciting, but it isn't being done just by sitting at a library desk hidden under a pile of books.
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