The Mod Bod

Writersworld Newsletter - Issue No. 30

This article is reprinted by kind permission of The Times.

by Tom Gatti The Times - Saturday July 17 2004

Four hundred years ago the august Bodleian Library refused a book request from Charles I. Now its rare, historic editions are going online where anyone can read them. Tom Gatti visits a true republic of learning.

In the dark-panelled hush of Duke Humfreyâs Library in Oxford, time doesnât just stand still, it retreats. It inches back in the aisles and lingers on the cracked leather. Latin-inscribed spines. It curls around a stone-wrought corbel ö a shock-eyed face leaning out from the wall, hand over mouth, enacting its timeless injunction: ÎTread lightly and talk littleâ.

Duke Humfreyâs is the foundation stone of the Bodleian Library, opened by Thomas Bodley in 1602 as a repository of knowledge for Oxford University, the oldest English-speaking university in the world. Francis Bacon called the Bodleian Îan Ark to save learning from the delugeâ and endorsement that is still quoted proudly in its publicity. But this is an ark in more ways than one; a poetic time capsule that seems to have as little to do with 21st-century life as bear-baiting and starched ruffs. Now that few surviving public libraries are being rebranded as cappuccino-vending Ideas Stores, and we experience a daily information Îdelugeâ that even the most opium-addled 17th-centruy citizen could not have dreamt of, we might reasonably conclude that the Bodleian can survive only as a museum. Try to remove a book from the shelf in Duke Humfreyâs, as I have done, and an alarm wails in distress. (Even in the libraryâs cinematic role, as Harry Potterâs Hogwarts Library, a book screams prohibitively at Potter).

Appearances, however, could not be more deceptive. There might be something museum-like, or even mausoleum-like, about the buildings that make up the Bodleian, with their magnificent Corinthian columns and twisting chthonic passages, but in the background hums a project that will transform the Bodleian ö affectionately known as the Bod ö into a brave new library, a gleaming information service of the future. As part of a £40 million modernisation campaign, thousands of manuscripts and printed pages are being painstakingly scanned and made freely accessibly online. No need to put up with travel, officious rules, or screaming books: the new Bodleian is in your bedroom, and its doors open at the click of a button.

The library is already a phenomenal resource, holding more than eight million printed items, not including its many maps and manuscripts. It is England's original library of legal Deposit ö a status now shared with Cambridge University Library and the British Library ö which means that it receives a free copy of every work published in the UK and Ireland (about 1,000 printed items land on the doorstep every day). In its infinite vaults you will find not only the most recent scholarly monographs, but also books such as Honk if You Like Honkers; With a Honker that Really Works! (And, yes the Bodleian has kept the honker, although in the gathered silence of the library, testing its functionality is not recommended).

The Bodleian's historic collection, too, is unique. The only surviving first edition of Marloweâs Dr Faustus, early 13th-century illuminated Byzantine Gospels, Gustav Holstâs handwritten opening of The Planets Suite, and the complete run of the sumptuously illustrated 1950s comic The Eagle share space on its shelves. The Bodleianâs collection of manuscripts, which includes a wealth of oriental items and 12,000 medieval documents, is the second largest in the UK. Despite the forbidding aura of Duke Humfreyâs, the Bodâs millions of texts are in use: thousands of readers visit the library buildings every day, and more than half of those are from outside the UK, let alone the university.

Gaining access to its treasures, however, can be a circuitous process. Space restrictions mean that most of the libraryâs stock is in book stacks, underground or outside Oxford, and it takes between two hours to two days for requested items to be delivered to a reading room. Precious manuscripts have to be kept at a regulated temperature, in a protected environment: if they are to last, they must be handled as little as possible. Those who are not members of the university must apply for a readerâs card, which might not necessarily be granted. And, of course, books cannot be borrowed. Zealous guardians of their printed wards, staff still fondly cite the occasion in 1645 when King Charles I was refused the loan of a book (during the last stages of the Civil War, he sent round from his college headquarters for a French history of the world, and John Rous, the librarian, sent back a polite rejection).

The digital revolution could make all this irrelevant. At least 75,000 items are freely available through the Bodleian website, with more being added every day. One of the first projects was the Broadside Ballads collection - 30,000 printed ballads from the 16th to the 20th century, made available in digital, searchable format. From nonsense choruses ("Wack, row de dow & c.") to French Revolution invasion scares ('They're straight coming o'er/To murder, and plunder, and ravish, and burn'), the ballads, often accompanied by expressive illustrations, are an invaluable resource to anyone interested in English popular culture and history. Another central corpus is of 80 complete medieval manuscripts, including Welsh poetry, English mystery plays and Latin treaties on musical theory. The Bodleian is not he only institution to offer digital services: American libraries such as the University of Virginiaâs have been creating electronic texts for more than a decade. But while these offer useful, searchable online editions of Milton and Melville, they cannot match the primary materials of a library that has been collecting for 400 years. The Bodleian website, which currently represents only a fraction of the collection, is already brimming with textual delights.

With the growth of the Internet, the intellectual world - what Bodley called the 'Republic of the Learned' - has opened out into a universe. The 'hybrid library', so called because it encompasses both physical and virtual readying rooms, is a way for the Bodleian to secure its place on the shifting map, and to make Bodleyâs democratic, international vision a truly global one. It's an idealist project, but traditionalists worry that it will be the death of the traditional library; the Frankenstein that destroys its creator. Already the Bodleian attracts ore online readers than physical ones; when the whole collection can be viewed through the portable frame of a laptop computer, who will visit the buildings and read the books?

In 1936 the German theorist Walter Benjamin asked a similar question, and his prognosis was bleak: 'That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art' The more something is copied, the less power it holds - once you have enough replicas, you can throw the original away and nobody will bat an eyelid.

Experience suggests otherwise. The Mona Lisa is the most reproduced work of art in the world, and yet five million people a year flock to the Louver in Paris to stand wide-eyed before it. The original holds the impetus of its creation and the story of its existence - we will always return to it.

The Bodleianâs digital library will increase awareness of ö and allow instant access to ö the collection, while prolonging its life. But staff at the Bodleian are confident that people will continue to use the library; to touch, smell and read the books. The relationship between original and reproduction is, after all, a symbiotic one. And although many students now obtain much of their information electronically, through online journals or digitised texts like those being created in Oxford, the physical experience cannot by replicated on-screen. There is the learned ambience; the domed ceiling, ladders and pools of light in the Bodleianâs 18th-century Radcliffe Camera, for example, create an environment in which only breathing comes before reading. There is the serendipity of browsing, which can yield hidden prizes; only last year, an unpublished poem by Siegfried Sassoon was discovered tucked away in a corner of the Bod. Then there is the act of selection; pulling a book from a shelf remains a more instinctive, exciting action than clicking a mouse, flicking oneâs eyes from left to right over a printed page a more natural process then negotiating the scroll and glare of a computer screen.

Luckily for us, the Bodleian is determined to have the best of both worlds; preparing a global library for the virtual future, maintaining a glorious library for the still-bookish present, and all the while preserving the aura of the past.