On the whole I am not an addictive type, but I must admit to a weakness for libraries. My unconscious mind, lethargic about many things, is always primed with pretexts for a visit to the Bodleian, or a great overseas library, or some quirky special collection. It can always conjure up an urgent need to look at a book that has probably not been opened for 200 years, or to see what some classic text looked like before modern editors took it into their heads to modernise its spelling and punctuation, and perhaps its meaning too. I know that my library habit is unlikely to add more than a particle to the total store of human knowledge, but that takes nothing away from my delight in capturing some fugitive fact, correcting someone’s misquotation, or lighting upon a marginal scrawl that has been transformed, by the passage of time, from an act of literary vandalism into a poignant message from a reader now lost to the world.

The smell of old bindings and the sound and texture of dry paper can of course enhance the pleasures of a session in a library, but after browsing in the lush digital pastures of Early American Newspapers, Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Early English Books Online over the past year, I am learning to get by without them. As well as giving me instant access to high-resolution images of every single page of thousands of rare old books and papers, these virtual libraries allow me to conduct instantaneous electronic searches covering every word within them. If you have never read books online before, or if your experience is confined to those endless scrolls of questionable text in plain typefaces provided by worthy old enterprises like Project Gutenberg, you will be in for a very pleasant surprise: the advantages of an exact photographic image are seamlessly combined with those of computer-searchable text, and the results will take your breath away.

These new online collections have been put together by commercial publishers looking for financial returns, and they don’t come cheap. If you are a researcher at one of the plusher universities, you may have had the subscriptions paid on your behalf, in which case you should be deeply grateful; but ordinary citizens working from home will need hundreds of pounds a year to cover their dues to the publishers. If you are like me, however, you will keep your credit card in your wallet and notch up a new justification for your library habit, though you will have to restrict yourself to the small minority that can afford the institutional subscriptions, and you will have to accustom yourself to spending your time at a computer terminal rather than a desk. It may not quite be heaven, but as far as I’m concerned it’s not far off.

• Share
•  Subscribe to post comments