ABSTRACT
Over the last 30 years, slowly and tentatively at first and with a sharp increase in pace during the last decade, memory institutions have taken to digital technologies for the innate increased accessibility and usability of digital objects to remediate their documentary heritage, opening up multiple new avenues of research capitalizing on the transformative nature of the new media. Traditional digitization of books (intended here in the most general acceptation of the word, comprising manuscripts and printed books) has focused on the remediation of their content—i.e., textual and figurative features—as visual objects through direct acquisition of data via strict photographic means. Books are, however, complex technological objects that have changed and adapted to the evolution of their content and whose shapes and forms are determined, like any other tool, by human anatomy, their inner working, and their use, and whose essence cannot generally be captured and transmediated through direct acquisition processes. Nevertheless, the information embedded in the materiality of books tells the story of their production and use just as much as their content. Recently, increased awareness of the importance of books’ materiality has led to projects that have attempted to bring into the digital more information than what is straightforwardly captured through the camera lens. This chapter will also show how book conservators—although often only considered ancillary professionals focused on preserving the original artifacts—have the knowledge and attitude to read and discern history from material clues. When their methodologies and knowledge are integrated into the entire digitization process, they can prove invaluable in producing digital objects that can represent, at least partially, the materiality of books. By understanding the informational content of books as objects and the potential role of conservators and other practitioners focused on the materiality of books, we can create more complete digital surrogates that represent both textual and material features and bring about a new conception of digital libraries.
