Robert Crawford’s poem Digital Library, St Andrews, finishes with these lines ….
Where laptops open like thick-leaved books
The flatpack wealth of nations.
I know this because I listened to him talk to John MacColl in the latest PARCast …
Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews, and well-known poet, talks with John MacColl about scholarship, the importance of digitized archives and the inspiration his poetry derives from new technologies.
The discussion includes details about the scholarship which supported “Scotland’s Books,” a recently published book about the history of Scottish literature, and a forthcoming biography of Robert Burns. Also included is Robert’s description of the importance of digitized archives as well as the pleasure of working with paper in archives such as that at St Andrews, with hundreds of years’ worth of undigitized materila still to be charted. [Crawford Podcast [OCLC]]
Check out Robert Crawford’s Worldcat Identity page.
This is the ninth PARcast. Earlier interviews were with Richard Ovenden (Bodleian Library, Oxford), Jackie Dooley
(Consulting Archivist, OCLC Programs and Research), Ken Hamma (then Executive Director for Digital Policy and Initiatives J. Paul Getty Trust), MacKenzie Smith (Associate Director for Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries), Jenn Riley (Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Program, Indiana University), Dennis Meissner (Head of Collections Management, Minnesota Historical Society), Jeremy Frumkin (Head of Emerging Technologies,
Oregon State University), Mark Dimunation (Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress).
