Perseus Digital Library Quotes

The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it's their property, so to speak. ~ Robert Darnton

The point is not that books, magazines, and DVDs are dead - far from it. At places such as the redesigned Boston Public Library, popular publications and media materials in physical form circulate rapidly from prominent spaces close to the building's entrance. The point is that people's information habits have undergone a sea change - a major shift toward the digital. Libraries are trying to serve a wide range of patrons at many different points along an "adoption curve," with all-print at one end and all-digital at the other. ~ John Palfrey

Writing in Library Journal, Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of Book envisioned a digital ecology in which "parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven toghether out of components in remote databases and servers." Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York times Magagzine: "In the the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages. ~ Jeff Jarvis

Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced. ~ Maurice Wilkes

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries. ~ Jonathan Zittrain

Information is nutrition, knowledge is nutrition, art is nutrition and they set us free. Internet is a great library, great library is a freedom within wisdom in this digital age ~ Baris Gencel

We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it. ~ Richard Dawkins

What is the value of libraries? Through lifelong learning, libraries can and do change lives, a point that cannot be overstated. ~ Michael E. Gorman

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digi ~ Jaron Lanier

I don't think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don't forget that there are also books. I don't believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they're certainly not synonymous. ~ Alberto Manguel

If we give up on having library collections (digital or otherwise) and outsource access to and preservation of knowledge to corporations, we will have neither access nor preservation. ~ Barbara Fister

Wouldn't it be great if you could put all the published works online? The Internet Archive is trying to become useful as a modern-day digital library. ~ Brewster Kahle

If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library. ~ Peter Singer

A library, properly maintained, could save the world, or burn it down. ~ Jason Fagone

There must be every kind of books in your library. The most beautiful gardens are those with many different flowers, with all kinds of herbs and weeds! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

He is writing a book," said the King, following them out into the sunny, crisp gardens. "About the gardens here. We have two of his books already. Library, north side, O. What say you, Miss Azalea? Does he pass that list of your sisters'?"
Azalea cocked her head. Was the king actually teasing her?
"He'll have to shave," she said, deciding to take his lead.
"And what," said the King, stroking his own close-trimmed beard, "is wrong with whiskers?"
Azalea laughed, surprised at the King's uncharacteristic funning. ~ Heather Dixon

In the library I was handed a blueprint on how to live the mysterious, unnamable, big dream life I wanted. I was handed books. And through reading them, I grew up to find that very life. ~ Ann Hood

People often say that football and boxing are the ways out of the working class and they are your ticket out of that kind of life, if you happen to want to leave it. But, for me, the library is the key. That is where the escape tunnel is. All of the knowledge in the world is there. The great brains of the world are at your fingertips. ~ Billy Connolly

It is good netiquette to use the internet for online education. Learn new things. NetworkEtiquette.net ~ David Chiles

In order to thrive in the 21st century, you have to be a savvy citizen of the digital economy or risk being left behind. ~ Leila Janah

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life. ~ Ray Bradbury

There is no law of physics that says just because we're connected, there has to be this schism between our physical lives and our digital lives. ~ Astro Teller

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read. ~ Charles Kuralt

Ms. Ellie Bockert Augsburger, owner of Creative Digital Studios, did a most excellent job. I feel compelled to mention that she had great ideas for Storm Warning. When asked to switch, she did so with ease, for this and many other reasons, I highly recommend her. In addition to cover art, she does graphic designs for businesses. She did a silhouette of an eagle similar to the one on Call Sign: Wrecking Crew (Wings of Eagles) for our business logo. ~ Lynn Hallbrooks

To clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles, closing the blind spots, or to provide guidance, so that the business as a whole can take a digital leap and unleash its full potential. ~ Pearl Zhu

One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library. ~ Sarah Noffke

A lot of the stuff in 'Speed Racer' has never been done before, from it having a multi-tone, to it having a retro-cool family movie, to having the photo-realism with the CG-backgrounds and infinite focus the way they worked with these digital cameras, to even the color experimentation. ~ Emile Hirsch

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn."

À qui la faute? (1872) ~ Victor Hugo

Brian Myers takes a fresh approach. He largely ignores what the regime tells the outside world about itself, but concentrates instead on what North Koreans themselves are supposed to believe, paying special attention to the North Korean narratives and mass culture, including movies and television shows. ( ... ) There are few books that can give the world a peek into the Hermit Kingdom. The Cleanest Race provides a reason to care about how those in North Korea see themselves and the West. It is possibly the best addition to that small library. ~ Andrei Lankov

I think that's so particularly exciting about this moment in time is all the new platforms that are now existing, the Netflixes and the Hulus and Amazons and so and so forth; I mean they are really doing what pay TV was doing twenty years ago. So a show like Dancing On The Edge gets to have a digital life after it's playing on Starz. I think what's exciting is how these new platforms are providing more opportunities both for first-run programming on the one hand but also for second plays for shows that have appeared first either on traditional broadcast or on cable. ~ Colin Callender

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York.. a city neighborhood that included houses, lampposts, walls, and bushes. But with an early bedtime in the winter, I could look out my window and see the stars, and the stars were not like anything else in my neighborhood. [At age 5] I didn't know what they were. [At age 9] my mother … said to me, "You have a library card now, and you know how to read. Take the streetcar to the library and get a book on stars." … I stepped up to the big librarian and asked for a book on stars. … I sat down and found out the answer, which was something really stunning. I found out that the stars are glowing balls of gas. I also found out that the Sun is a star but really close and that the stars are all suns except really far away I didn't know any physics or mathematics at that time, but I could imagine how far you'd have to move the Sun away from us till it was only as bright as a star. It was in that library, reading that book, that the scale of the universe opened up to me. There was something beautiful about it. At that young age, I already knew that I'd be very happy if I could devote my life to finding out more about the stars and the planets that go around them. And it's been my great good fortune to do just that. ~ Carl Sagan

We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but the grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. ~ Susan Orlean

All we are asking for is balance. I would like to think that I could walk into a public library and find not only works by Gloria Steinem but also those of Phyllis Schlafly. I would like to think a teenager could be taught in sex education that a serious alternative to abortion is teenage abstinence, or should pregnancy occur, that adoption might be preferable. I am not trying, as the ad says, to shove religion down anyone's throat. But I do think everyone has a right, and that the Christian voice is being chocked off. ~ Cal Thomas

I will say that Vertigo is an area of great interest to me. It is even less well tapped than other parts of DC, and could potentially offer amazing stories for our future television video game, digital and consumer products businesses. ~ Diane Nelson

A school library is like the Bat Cave: it's a safe fortress in a chaotic world, a source of knowledge and the lair of a superhero.

True, the superhero is more likely to be wearing a cardigan than a batsuit, but still... ~ Tom Angleberger

You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe. ~ Jasper Fforde

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories. ~ Jennifer Lanthier

But the Library still held everything he'd ever wanted, too. All the knowledge in the world, right at his fingertips ~ Rachel Caine

I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library. ~ Leo Kottke

You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public. ~ Clay Shirky