ABSTRACT
Recent contributions have drawn digital editors’ attention to the end users of their endeavours and the ways they use or might use them. In particular, a recurrent question seems to be: ‘are digital editions texts to be read or objects to be used?’ When examining the rationale of the dual publication of Henry III Fine Rolls Project, Ciula and Lopez seem to imply that both activities characterise the genre: ‘For a scholar interested in the historical record, the reading of the Fine Rolls edition as the seeking of information related to it is a comprehensive process that does not stop when the book is closed or the browser is shut.’ (Ciula and Lopez, 2009, p. 133). Tim McLoughlin (2010) points out how, in the electronic medium, we have become users who no longer read texts but ‘browse’, ‘search’ and ‘navigate’ digital ‘objects’ (p. 40). In reply, Rehbein (2010) insists that searching and browsing are not exclusive to digital devices, but that they characterise our use of certain kinds of printed books; he gives the example of so-called access resources, such as dictionaries (pp. 63–64).
