This weeks’ Studium Generale lecture was delivered by Maarten Asscher, director of the Athenaeum Bookstore in Amsterdam, in which he contemplated the current position of the bookstore in the Netherlands. In his lecture he gave a broad perspective on the book selling business and at the same time he tried to cope with the pessimistic spirit haunting the book world. For one, Asscher does not believe the ‘overproduction’ of book titles on the Dutch market is necessary a bad thing, for a certain amount of overproduction ensures the pluriformity of the book market.  For there are certain selection mechanisms that ensure that those titles that are the most important artifacts for cultural transmission are brought to the public. First of all there is the publisher, who selects those titles that are to be published from the even larger amount of delivered manuscripts. From this selection the second selection is made when reviewers and critics only pay attention to a certain fraction of the published books. The last selection is in the hands of the people who decide what to buy for their libraries or bookstores. Together, these mechanisms make sure the book culture is sustained.

A second strain of cultural pessimism Asscher mentions, has to do with the fear of digitization and e-books. For a lot of people in the book business are afraid that with the coming of e-books people will buy and read less books. In Asscher’s view these fears are exaggerated. For instance, he believes that especially ‘information’ based books will be susceptible to digitization. On the other hand academic books in for example the humanities will for long hold their position in the paper world. Asscher foresees that if these books will eventually only appear as e-books they will loose the contact with the general public, for they will draw back into their peer-reviewed virtual surroundings without reaching a broader audience. And this is where the bookstore plays an important role as it is not concerned so much with information as well as with ‘written culture’. And in this sense the bookstore needs to be a public meeting place or a cultural haven, a place were culture and society meet, in other words, the bookstore needs to establish relationships with its artistic and cultural surroundings. And to establish and sustain this the bookstore also needs to be active on the Internet. Asscher promotes the virtual bookstore, which, with its expertise and knowledge, can be a valuable asset to the digital cultural landscape. In this way, Asscher says, a bookstore can and must be a little bit of everything: a library, a publisher, a museum, a theater, a debating centre, but most of all, it needs to be a bookstore: a place where our written culture is sustained and transmitted.

And in this regard it is very interesting to see how even in the digital era, the bookstore might still function as an important connection between the academic world and the general public, between science and society.  

Oh how lucky we are this year. Not only do we have the exhibition about Leiden as a city of books, also Amsterdam is going to be the WorldBookCapital for one year, starting next week on April the 23rd.

The 18th of May shouldn’t be missed by any booklover, because then Amsterdam will host the world’s biggest book market.

Check also the rest of the program and don’t forget to download the BidBook, which contains a detailed outline of the activities and ‘ends with a description of the existing finely-woven infrastructure of the Dutch booktrade’.

It seems that 2008 is an important year for the printing world in several corners of this planet. While in Brazil it’s celebrated 200 years of the “Imprensa Régia” (or that printing was finally allowed in the country - sorry no links in English), in Scotland they celebrate 500 years of printing. And you can know more about here.

From 25th April until 7th September 2008 the Allard Pierson Museum (The Archeologic Museum of the University of Amsterdam) will be helding the exhibition Lectori Salutem:

“We use letters, words and text every day. Why do we write on A4-format paper and prefer to use the Times Roman font? Is a miniature called a miniature because it is a small picture? What could you find in ancient libraries? What role do ancient texts play in contemporary computer games and films? You can find the answers at the exhibition lectori salutem, which deals with the origins and history of books in and after classic antiquity.

lectori salutem, illustrates a number of key moments in the history of the book. Original objects, beautiful manuscripts and books from Dutch collections, photographs and texts show how the works of classical authors, such as Homer, have stood the test of time.

The exhibition lectori salutem, is part of the UNESCO programme Amsterdam World Book Capital 2008 and runs simultaneously with the start of the Week of the Classics. “

More information here.

To all web 3.0 disbelievers it might come as a surprise that this is already the 5th European Semantic Web Conference. Held five days under the Spanish sun, the program consits of two days of workshops and three days of actual conference. Although most of the topics are more technical, it should be interesting for anyone who believes the future of the web will be 3.0. Unfortunately it’s quite costly to attend (prices start at € 500).

What is the Semantic Web, also called web 3.0 anyway?

Besides that it is ‘alive’ (quote from Tom Heath, CATCH Interoperability meeting, March 2008), it is seen as an upgrad of the current ’social web’, also called web 2.0, that thrives on user generated content. The main problem is that the computer itsself doesn’t understand the content of documents online. Like web 2.0 is a web of documents, web 3.0 is machinereadable web. A very good explanation of the problem and its possible solution is the video of trueknoledge.com, the beta version of a semantic search engine. In short: it is all about marking up meta data in a way that creates relationships between sets of data. Relationships that can be interpreted by the computer rather than the human searching for information. Like this the machine becomes intelligent. Content already exists on millions of pages, in millions of databases. Now it is about time to deal with its meaning. Content may have been king, contextualization is the future. The future is now!

If you want to get to know more about web 3.0 check this links:
Semantic Web: An introduction
What will be the semantic killer application?
CATCH (Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage) - Cultural Heritage Institutions go 3.0

Following two successful international symposia on The History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East, held at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz (2002) and at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (2005), we are now convening the third meeting on the same themes. This will take place in Leipzig, 25-27 September 2008, and it will form part of the 24th Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants (UEAI). This Symposium, however, will not be confined to printing in Arabic and Muslim languages, but will, as before, cover a range of Middle Eastern languages and scripts.

There has been a good response to our Call for Papers, and the list is now closed. We have accepted proposals for contributions on printing and publishing in Arabic, Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, Kipchak, Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, Syriac, Tatar and Turkish; and in Afghanistan, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Iraq, Latin America & the Caribbean, Tatarstan, Tunisia, Turkey and Ukraine, as well as in the region generally.

The list of papers accepted is here.

Tuesday’s lecture in the Leiden City of Books series hosted by Studium Generale was delivered by Harm  

Beukers, Scaliger professor Special Collections in Leiden. The topic of his lecture was 17th century medics

and their libraries. He focused especially on the Leiden professor Fransiscus Sylvius (1614-1672). One of

Sylvius most important publications was the “Praxeos medicae idea nova, 1671″ (New idea in medical practice).

Beukers wonders were Sylvius’ new ideas originated from. One way to find out is by taking a look at what it 

was that Sylvius exactly read. Beukers did some research on what was present in Sylvius’ library and how this  differed from other medics’ libraries of that age in order to find an explanation for the originality of Sylvius’ ideas.

What were these ‘new ideas’ exactly? First of all, Sylvius was the founder of the 17th-century iatrochemical school of medicine, which held that all phenomena of life and disease are based on chemical action. The idea that all bodily phenomena can be traced to chemical processes was quite new. Another of Sylvius’ innovations lies in his emphasis on the importance of the practical teaching of medicine, for which he established the Collegium Medico Practicum. For Sylvius the three pillars of medicine were animal experiments, patient observations and autopsy.

One of the resources Beukers used to track down information about Sylvius’ book collection was the inventory of his belongings, made up after his death. Beukers emphasizes correctly that this isn’t the most reliable source, for many times the auctioneers tried to throw in some unsold books of their own, to ensure their sale together with a ‘famous library’. But if we do take a look at the list, we can see that Sylvius’ library had almost no literature, a lot of (medical) classics (from Hippocrates to Galenus) ánd also a lot of books on alchemy, which could explain something about the nature of the ‘chemical influences’ in his work. He also had numerous works from his friend Descartes, who, like Sylvius, loved to ‘distil the spirits’.

A comparison with the libraries of other physicians of that time, like the one belonging to Lucas Schacht (1634-1689), shows the uniqueness of Sylvius’ library when it comes to its alchemy works. However, Sylvius was not altogether alone in this respect, for the physician Fransiscus Gomarus (1563-1641) also had some works on alchemy in his library.

Beukers’ lecture offered a fascinating journey into the history and origin of ideas and is a very good example of how book history can be very well used to reconstruct the Zeitgeist of a certain period. Next week Prof. Gerard Unger will give a lecture on the history of typography in Leiden. Be there or be square.

 

For all of you who support guaranteed Open Access to publicly funded
works, there is a petition (sponsored by SPARC and JISC) you can sign here:

http://www.ec-petition.eu/

It’s time for change!

The proposal for Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) from the Amsterdam University Press together with five European University Presses within the eContentplus Programme, has been selected for negotiations on funding. Agreements are expected this May and if the programme really gets funded, it is scheduled to start in September 2008.

Being the first programme of this kind it could be reshaping the world of scientific publishing:

“OAPEN intends to develop and implement an Open Access publication model for peer reviewed academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This Open Access publication model will also serve as a model in other scientific domains and improve the spread of European research results. The project aims to achieve a sustainable European approach to improve the quantity, visibility and usability of high quality academic research and foster the creation of new content by developing future-oriented publishing solutions, including an Online Library.” (source)

Press release OAPEN

eContentplus programme 

The title of the conference is quite a mouthfull - ‘Strategies for Sustainable Access and Creative Reuse of Images and Sounds Online‘ - but the program is nonetheless more than promising.

Legal seminar on audiovisual archives and Intellectual Property Rights
Location: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum
Date: Thursday April 10, 2008
Time: 10.00 - 17.00 hrs
Legal issues on digitisation and reuse of audiovisual content. The legal seminar includes two workshops on orphan works and clearing rights, and secondly on archives and open content publishing.

Economies of the Commons Conference: Day I & II
Location: De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam
Friday 11 en Saturday 12 April , 2008.  10 - 18.00 hrs
for the packed program click here for the webpage or download the pfd-file Program Economies of the Commons Conference.

Main themes of the conference:
‘The conference will focus specifically on the creation of public audiovisual archives and their sustainability, analysing and comparing across different domains where they emerge. Specific legal and technological questions involved in the creation of these new type of digital repositories will also be addressed (among others Intellectual Property Rights and the problems of the structuring of data collections, retrieval and metadata, new approaches in social tagging, and more) while attempts will be made to bridge between different disciplinary discourses and social contexts.’