I thought I’ d show you what I’ve been up to today. I learnt something new today and found the experience … interesting.
Well, last week I ordered a book through the library, via interlending. It had to come from Göttingen (actually I ordered two books, the other from Berlin which is now on my desk here and it’s a weird feeling that I’m collecting all the autobiographies from the 19th century that are available in german university libraries) and I got the email that it had arrived on Tuesday. I was a bit annoyed that the email said I couldn’t take the book with me, only use it in the library’s reading room. I assumed it was maybe an old edition, a rare book, maybe even a first edition and that they didn’t want to give a book that old into my hands. I did not expect it to be a microfilm roll.
I had no idea how to use it, I didn’t even know where the scanner for it was to be found so I asked for help. (I admit that for a moment I considered just giving it back and not look at it but it might have been the bit of information that made my thesis outstanding (not it’s not) and I then I also was just simply curious to see how it worked.
And then I learnt how to use microfilm. It looked just like a small film reel (not that I ever saw a film reel in real life) and there were the negative pictures of the pages of the book I had ordered put together as a long film. I couldn’t help thinking about what a weird medium microfilm actually is. You can put everything on these I expect what originally was on paper. It’s a series of pictures, just like a movie and you view it on a monitor by the way of a very complicated looking object lens. You turn a wheel and the film reel starts to spin, sending one picture after the other underneath the lens. Viewing it is like looking at the single pictures of a movie, like the projector was simply showing one picture after the other. If you’d spin it like a movie it wouldn’t make sense, the pictures of pages of a book wouldn’t make moving pictures like a movie does and looking at the single pictures in a movie would be quite a surreal affair as well.
And then I thought… this is like the e-book of the last generation. This analogy doesn’t really work in all aspects but it does in a way. So I’ll try to explain. Microfilm is used to preserve first of all. You get historic books on them, or pictures that maybe only survived as very few copies, maybe just one. So this is a way to make it accessible to more people. What I looked at today was a book that is not available in print in any German library and I don’t know how many copies are available in Great Britain. I assume not very many either. So the British Library complied a series of microfilm reels containing working class autobiographies that then could be distributed further (don’t ask me how exactly, I assume they were sold) making it thus possible that I use this autobiography for my thesis. (In the end I won’t use it, but you get the idea 
)
So now look at what Google is doing with Google Books. They take books that are out of copyright and scan them and make them available to a wider public. I have looked at a few of these so far, all from different libraries from all over the USA. One even from Harvard. Isn’t it great that I can access books that otherwise would have been quite out of my reach, maybe only available at the British Library, causing probably some stress to get them?
Let me stress though that I see the problems surrounding Google Books … I really do. It just hit me that what is happening is not new. It’s just that microfilm was never a convenient medium to a general public, opposed to e-books. And yes, I know, what most understand as an e-book is not a pdf. file of scanned pages of a real book but I think the whole thing started like this and I also think that it started as a microfilm-improvement. Media revolution…? Maybe like so many things it’s also rather a media evolution that we’re going through.
