<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>In conjunction with the Museums10 "BookMarks" program, our seminar will meet to discuss writings and themes of the speakers taking part in the series of events relating to the history and future of the book ("Books to Blogs and Back" weekend).</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The seminar will take place at:</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Emily Dickinson Hall Lounge</DIV><DIV>Hampshire College</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Thursday, 8 November</DIV><DIV>7:00 p.m.</DIV><DIV>as always, light refreshments will be provided</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>(details will follow, and texts will be available in advance)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Below is a provisional description of the events of Books/Blogs.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>We are very pleased that our seminar is in full swing again, and we look forward to seeing you.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Jim Wald</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">The Program (all events take place at Mount Holyoke College)</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Thursday, November 15, 2007</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Keynote lecture</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Gamble Auditorium, 7:00 pm</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Robert Darnton, recently named Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of Harvard University Library, has helped to create the field known as “the history of the book.” A former Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, as well as de Chevalier of France’s Légion d’honneur, Darnton is internationally recognized not only for his work on the literary world of Enlightenment France as well as the history of the book in general. Announcing his appointment last May, Harvard Provost Steven Hyman described him as “an entrepreneur in exploring electronic books, Web publishing, and other forms of new media.”</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">For his presentation, “The Research Library in the New Age of Information,” Darnton asks: How can we get our bearings in the new landscape created by the explosion of information technology? An attempt to put the present in historical perspective suggests two arguments. According to the first, technological change since the invention of writing has increased at such an accelerating rate that we have entered a new era, one without precedent: the information age. According to the second, every age is an age of information, each in its own way, and the current sense of bewilderment at the textual chaos in cyberspace ignores a fundamental fact: texts have always been unstable. Whether we consider the daily newspaper or the First Folio of Shakespeare, we encounter shifts in meaning produced in the very process of transmission. Instead of entering a new era, therefore, we may be suffering from a collective case of false consciousness. But the modern modes of communicating information have created a new role for research libraries. They still stand at the center of campuses, their architecture proclaiming their importance for the preservation of knowledge. But behind their classical facades they store and transmit digitized information in new ways. Far from being made obsolete by enterprises like Google, they function as platforms for developing new kinds of scholarship; and they may be crucial in correcting some of the inadequacies of Google itself</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Friday, November 16, 2007 </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Interactive Workshops, 9:00 – 11:00 am </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">LITS Information Commons, Mount Holyoke College Library</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Interactive activities and exhibits relating to the history of book creation and publication</DIV><DIV>Hand bookbinding demonstrations by Val Moss of the Boston University Conservation Lab</DIV><DIV>Small letterpress printing demonstration by master printer Carl Darrow of Historic Deerfield</DIV><DIV>University of Massachusetts Press, Bruce Wilcox</DIV><DIV>Zines</DIV><DIV>Self Publishing Online (LuLu)</DIV><DIV>I-Photo books</DIV><DIV>Braille Books: how technology has help the disabled</DIV><DIV>Blogs</DIV><DIV>Kirtas Book Scanner demonstration by Joseph Merritt & Company</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Lecture, 11:00 am</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Dwight 101</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Jason Epstein has been involved in book publishing since the 1950s. At Doubleday he created Anchor Books, which helped to propel the so-called “paperback revolution” and established the trade paperback format. With colleagues, he founded the New York Review of Books and in the 1982 created the Library of America, the prestigious publisher of American classics. For many years, he was editorial director of Random House. He also created the Readers Catalog of Back Titles, a precursor to online stores like Amazon; and co-founded OnDemandBooks, the company that sells the book vending machine.</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Epstein will discuss how new digital technologies make the book publishing industry obsolete, but not the book itself. Rather, he sees digital technology as an opportunity to replace publishers – physical inventories and costly infrastructure – with deep virtual inventory that will be ubiquitously cheaply available to readers via print-on-demand machines, or Book ATMs. </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Panel discussion: The Past and Future of the Book, </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Gamble Auditorium, 1:30 pm</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Corey Flintoff, National Public Radio, moderator</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Terry Belanger, University Professor and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia since 1992, is the founding</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">director of the Rare Book School (RBS) there. Between 1972 and 1992, he ran a master's program for the training of rare book and special collections librarians at the Columbia School of Library Service. A 2005 MacArthur Fellow, he has given his $500,000 award to RBS support its work. He is dedicated to enhancing understanding of the importance of the book in an increasingly digital world and to getting “books as physical objects from where they’re not wanted to where they are.” For his presentation, “Books and Horses,” Belanger will take as his text a statement by Sandra Kirshenbaum (editor of Fine Print, 1975-1990) who has pointed out that the future of the codex book may turn out to be similar to that of the horse. There are still plenty of horses in the world, but they are now employed more for recreational purposes than for their horsepower. In a coda following his consideration of the long past of the codex book, he will speculate on its possible futures.</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Sven Birkerts, essayist and literary critic, has taught writing at Emerson College and Mount Holyoke College and is currently lecturer at Harvard University. Since 2002, Birkerts has been editor of AGNI, the web-based version of the acclaimed literary journal. He is most well known for writing The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the electronic age. In The Gutenberg Elegies, he has written: “Our growing immersion in interactive electronic communication” may be “cutting us off from the civilizing powers of the written word.” In his presentation, “The Hive Life,” based on a recent AGNI essay, he will focus less on the book itself than on the changing information environment, the shift to the merged and collective at the expense of the subjective/individual, which the book has for so long enshrined.</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Lisa Gitelman is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies, Catholic University in Washington DC. She studies media as uniquely complicated subjects of history. In her recent Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture, she writes: “A modern sense of history . . . is inextricable from experiences of inscription, of writing, print, photography, sound recording, cinema, and now—one must wonder—digital media that save text, image, and sound files. Specifically, when media are new, they help to challenge deeply held assumptions about the ways that meaning is authored and conveyed, revealing the points at which those assumptions remain importantly unsettled.” In her presentation, “Reading at Risk,” she casts her gaze toward the future of the book, focusing in part on novel reading. She will ask, for example, how in 200 years moral panic about reading novels has shifted to moral panic about not reading novels.</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Reception, 3:30 pm </DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Mount Holyoke College Library Courtyard</DIV><BR><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>|-<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>--<+>-|</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Libri is the discussion forum for all aspects of the world of the book, sponsored by the Hampshire College Center for the Book.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>• To send a message to all the list members (only members can post), send email to<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN><A href="mailto:libri@lists.hampshire.edu">libri@lists.hampshire.edu</A>.</DIV><P>• You can subscribe to the list, or change your existing subscription by going to:</P><DIV><A href="http://lists.hampshire.edu/mailman/listinfo/libri">http://lists.hampshire.edu/mailman/listinfo/libri</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN></SPAN> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>