Some of your may have caught the news about the exhibit of archival materials from Salman Rushdie at the Emory University Library. Display includes his four Apple laptops (one ruined by spilled coke) and several hand written journals. Incidentally, its not the hand written notes but all the digital stuff that’s giving archivists nightmares. With technology evolving at lightening speed your hi-tech dream gadget today will be extinct when you wake up tomorrow morning. How then does one save all the hundreds of gigabyte worth of digital information and actually be able to do so in a way that it can be “played back” later. We all (at least my generation) have dusty and chipped VHS cassettes but nothing to play them on! The question of digital vs. non digital has opened up discussion about evolution of very act of writing itself. Here’s an interesting article about the exhibit and its efforts to understand the modern complex relationship between technology and creativity.
On a very different note, the New York Public Library has displayed on its website scans of restaurant menus. If you are a food historian, an artist or plain foodie, you can print them for free or order prints from the library. Most of them are from early 1900s and are way more beautifully decorated than the modern slap -dash print-outs that one gets at restaurants. Enjoy! (Courtesy:www.thekitchn.com)
Filed under: FriendsOfBooks Tagged: | Archives, Digital Archives, Emory University, Library, New York Public Library, Restaurant Menus, Salman Rushdie
