I found Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s Facebook post extraordinarily depressing; I’ll reproduce it here (apart from the photos, which show lots of empty shelves) so you can be depressed too (or not, depending on your attitude toward these things):
Empty shelves. What used to be the literature collection of the University of Amsterdam in the PC Hooft building now feels like a ghostly place. Yesterday I happened to pass by and noticed that the doors were open, so I went inside and found myself wandering for half an hour through what used to be a buzzing place full of students, academics and, of course, books.
They are gone. After the summer last year, the UvA opened its (splendid!) new humanities library at the heart of the university quarter in the old city. The new building is beautiful, a great place for students and staff to come and study, and at first sight it looks like a true library, including many study places lined with books. I very much appreciate this new building, and yet the impression is deceptive, for most of the physical books have actually vanished from the library’s collection, replaced by digital copies. The heart is gone. What’s left is essentially an empty shell.
I had a conversation with a colleague who works in the UvA’s library context, and who told me how few books are actually left in the collection. When I expressed my feelings of malaise about this development, she asked me “but how often do you yourself still order a physical older book?” And I had to admit it: rarely. I buy books that I want to read. But like almost every other academic these days, I use digital copies of books that I just need to consult.
I understand the cold financial logic of getting rid of enormous collections of books that are never used (a previous librarian could tell me the exact housing costs for each square meter of books, in a city like Amsterdam where space it extremely expensive). But even apart from the well-established fact that digital books are much more vulnerable than physical ones and may simply not survive the future development of technology (take a moment to imagine what that means!), some unquantifiable quality gets lost forever if one can no longer smell and turn the yellowed pages in a book that was published a hundred years ago. They have an aura.
Most of all, I’m saddened by the managerial “presentist” mentality of not being worried all too much about the destruction of cultural and intellectual heritage. I’ll never forget a small exchange I once had in a café, when somebody asked me what I did for a living and I told her that I was a historian. For several seconds she looked at me with a stunned expression on her face, and finally managed to blurt out: “but… but… it’s over!” She just couldn’t fathom that somebody would be interested in the past.
In fairness, here’s a response from a librarian:
Former academic library director here. This is one of the true occasions in which there is a valid “both sides” argument and to a librarian faced with conflicting needs, there’s no true victor. It’s both win-win and lose-lose.
It was amazing how with one click of an auto-signature I added 10k books to the collection overnight. And when a researcher needed something we could acquire in within three hours rather than the processing time it took to acquire a physical copy. (Note my language: I do not distinguish between e-books and real books. They are all “real.”) You could get an item to a researcher no matter where they were as long as they had internet. They could access an entire collection remotely. (And yes, I actually have a micro fracture in one collarbone from too many years of poorly carrying a book bag!)
At the same time, as has been remarked: browsing a physical collection allows for greater opportunities for serendipitous discovery. Holding an item, marking a physical item allows for greater engagement and recall than what has been called “skimmy dipping” a digital text.
Digital books and physical books, ebooks and tree-books— both have and provide different values and needs. When I was director and made choices I would sometimes go through a decision tree: will we want this for a permanent part of the collection? Is this only helping one person and needn’t occupy valuable and limited shelf space? Will multiple users want or need simultaneous access to the text? &c. It’s a fraught balancing act between access and ownership, shrinking budget and space as publishing continues to pump out more (and more expensive) works.
TLDR? Housing an academic collection especially at the doctoral level is a lose-lose scenario.
Most of the other commenters share my despair.
If only the Great Library of Alexandria had been digitised, we should have all those works still!
I was vaguely aware that the stories about its ultimate sad end were largely mythical, but had not appreciated the extent to which the damage (over many centuries) was actually due to Hellenistic despots unhappy about uppity intellectuals, and to general Roman philistinism*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
Interesting speculation that the notorious remarks placed in the mouth of the Caliph Umar may have actually been the work of (much) later Muslim political propagandists. (The Abbottids, you might say …)
* First they came for Archimedes …
This is a complicated and changing calculus for librarians. Rare books, we might agree, need be sequestered. Most research libraries don’t have enough open stacks room for all volumes. Some departments don’t rely on paper books as much as others, but library budgets are partly affected by some bean counters by visits.
But some subsets, such as a dedicated subset classics library, may keep most. Which books are sent away, and who decides is a problem, and there is no good magical formula; when books often consulted but not checked out (i.e., which are actually or officially reference or course-reserve books) or when, say, Helen Vendler poetry analysis volumes are gone so undergraduates may not happen upon them, yikes. How many of multiple copies to shelve? Depends partly on reliable delivery. Cataloging has increased; browsing has decreased. Years ago some libraries hosted many desktop computers; less needed now. When available, interlibrary loan is great. It’s a complex problem.
In Western culture? That’s very hard to believe.
Who is generating the reliable and everlasting digital copies of books still too young to not be under copyright but too old and obscure for anyone to want to sort through the legalities? Think of all the ones you can only see in “snippet view” if you search the google books corpus.
And of course there are lots of currently-obscure books from 30 or 50 or 80 years ago which are not “rare” in the sense that the catalog’d libraries of the world collectively hold 500 to 1000 copies (plus presumably some more in private hands), even though in a given year somewhere between 0 and 3 of those copies are actually taken off a shelf and opened. But if 99% of those libraries individually decide to discard their underutilized copies, then suddenly it is a book that has become quite rare.
In Western culture? That’s very hard to believe
I’ve encountered this pretty often. An enthusiasm for national myths is a very different thing indeed from being actually interested in the past.
Yes, what DE said.
There’s an earlier generation of losses from this attitude to physical copies. Decades ago, many libraries put their newspaper archives on to microfiche and dumped the paper copies. But those copies are poor quality, and sometimes pages are missing because no-one checked that the low-paid workers doing the copying hadn’t turned over two pages at once.
Even if the microfiches are now digitally scanned, the OCR versions will be full of errors because of the low quality.
Depressing indeed. I understand that librarians face difficult choices and limited budgets, that students and even professors are reading less and doomscrolling more, and I don’t have any magic funding wand to solve such problems with. But if you can’t even trust university libraries to preserve these physical books, who can you trust? And if even universities can’t manage to preserve a culture of actually sitting down and reading through whole books at a time, who will? I use e-books plenty for reference like everyone else, out of necessity, but it’s not a remotely comparable experience; just as the librarian quoted above implies, I get less absorbed and remember it less well.
“In Western culture? That’s very hard to believe.”
I mean, we’re talking about a “Western culture” where a book called “The End of History” became a cultural landmark…
I’ve also noticed that even a lot (though not remotely all, in case that needs spelling out) of historians of modern periods tend to severely devalue any study that doesn’t focus on stuff that hasn’t, say, led very immediately to currently active political structures, conflicts, or the like. Which is a just a kind of variant of the same mentality, really, only a very little more expansively conceived.
I retired from academic librarianship 12 years ago, but even then this was a live issue. I was amazed, visiting the pioneering “learning commons” of another university library, to discover the main content of the building seemed to be scatter cushions and seminar rooms. Obviously, after 30 years of professional engagement I am not naive, or sentimental: spreading too little money ever more thinly to no one’s satisfaction is not a game I recommend. But let me quote from a blog post I wrote a couple of years after retirement:
[quote]
I knew my career in university libraries was coming to its end when our profession, in its over-eagerness to please, decided to smooth away as many as possible of those little difficulties that, essentially, constitute the real, actual educational benefit of using a research library. You know: learning how to look stuff up, determine whether it is relevant, and whether it exists in your institution, and if so, where and in what form, and if not, how to get hold of it. Above all, to discover the variousness of the world of books, information, and scholarship. Yes, it’s inconvenient and frustrating that different catalogues, databases, and reference works all make different assumptions, contain different materials, index them in different ways, and deliver them in different forms and to different degrees of completeness, but learning to navigate these peculiarities is all part of the art of becoming a competent researcher. It’s also a genuinely transferable life-skill: how to be indefatigable in the face of systematic bureaucratic obfuscation…
Or, so it seemed, until we decided the best way to serve our students and staff was to disguise and package up these many inconvenient differences – which still exist – into a one-stop automated vending-machine, capable of delivering instant gratification. Why, kids, you don’t even have to know how to spell what you’re looking for: we’ve taken care of that! Better, you don’t have to get out of bed, as all the stuff on your reading lists is online, right here, ready and waiting! We’ve spent hours of staff time getting hold of all those reading lists, tracking down the copyright holders, and getting it all legally scanned and digitised for you. So no more boring note-taking and queueing for photocopiers! We’ve even made an app, so you can “research” your essay on your phone, and it’s all so damned seamless, frictionless, and flavourless that you won’t know or care whether you’re reading a chapter from a book, an article in a peer-reviewed journal, a newspaper column, or a website put up by a 15-year-old as their school project. Spoon feeding? You’re kidding me: this is more like force-feeding geese for foie gras…
[end quote]
There seems to be no alternative, but our ever greater cultural dependence on potentially ephemeral electronic repositories seems likely to lead to a Great Forgetting at some point in the future, a new (quite possibly literal) Dark Ages, when someone accidentally or deliberately turns out the lights somewhere.
But I don’t mean the fact that she personally isn’t interested in the past. Of course that’s widespread. I mean the fact that she didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, that anyone was!
BTW, far too few people have read the actual paper. (Requires a free account.)
During the Reagan administration, to save money, the service hours of the Library of Congress were reduced.
In the current administration, funds for research, which in part go to research libraries to pay for books, journals, and librarian salaries, have been reduced.
Voting, so far, is still possible.
I mean the fact that she didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, that anyone was!
The solipsistic belief that if I don’t know or care about something no one else does either is not that uncommon. The current US President demonstrates this all the time.
I think ’90s software often seemed to at least try to approximate the serendipity of books or articles near the one that you were looking for. In modern digital interfaces such attempts to replicate that aspect of the physical seem to have fallen by the wayside, perhaps because digital implies vast oceans of choice well beyond what’s possible in regular back storage.
Nonetheless, as someone who hasn’t been a student anymore for a while now, the ability to do similar research from home without having to make time to go by an academic library is simply fantastic. It’s very different from being a student or a professional researcher, when you’re nearby already anyway or you have to go there regardless. But in any case, there are still countless undigitized materials to be found at academic and research libraries. 🙂
@Jon
My experience with microfiche is limited to what would’ve been yellowing fragile newspaper. I suspect the microfiche was in better condition, at least for now.
@David
Betteridge notes it ends with a question mark.
I mean the fact that she didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, that anyone was!
As Vanya says, people are solipsistic. I’m surprised this surprises you.
It’s food for thought, albeit a somber meal. I’ve been sorting my collection—more accurately ‘Accumulation’—of books and ephemera with a mind to donating much of it to my college/university special collections library.
Given the direction of research libraries, I ought to verify whether they intend to house printed and especially imprinted volumes. If not…I wonder who else might appreciate, among other curiosities, an assortment of illustrated editions of Don Quijote from five centuries and lots of countries. Suggestions welcomed.
cuchuflete, though I have no say-so, I bet the David M. Rubenstein rare book library at Duke U–which I recall having a strong Spanish program–would be proud to care for your Don Quijote collection.
Rubenstein invested in that library. Like Carnegie, back in the day. Unlike Jeff Bezos, who bought and is now sapping the Washington Post.
a Great Forgetting at some point in the future, a new (quite possibly literal) Dark Ages, when someone accidentally or deliberately turns out the lights somewhere
In my (unpublished) post-collapse trilogy, I call it “the Blinkout.”
As Vanya says, people are solipsistic. I’m surprised this surprises you.
I realize you and Vanya are using “solipsistic” figuratively, but I can’t imagine a conversation like what Hanegraaff describes. No doubt some people don’t understand why anyone would study the past, and some fraction of them would be tactless enough to say so in their first conversation with someone, but his new acquaintance seems to have not known that historians existed. I’m surprised you’re surprised DM is surprised.
Maybe I could almost imagine it like this:
“What do you do for a living?”
“Something valuable and endlessly surprising and fascinating.”
“You’re a doctor?”
“No.”
“An engineer?”
“No, I—”
“A cab driver, meeitng people all the time?”
A little impatient: “No, I’m a historian. I study the past.”
She looks stunned. Finally she blurts, ““But… but… it’s over!”
Almost.
There is, of course, a great deal of charm to physical books and library stacks. However, as disheartening as it is to see vast physical collections disappear, it is even more disheartening to see an academic librarian like Mike Chisholm extolling the disadvantages of those physical collections as “the real, actual educational benefit of using a research library.”
I suspect this pining for paper is largely restricted to the liberal arts rather than the sciences, and to books/monographs rather than journals and other collections of papers. Who misses the shelves and shelves of Chemical Abstracts?
Our university’s book store recently switched over to selling virtually nothing but clothes. We old-timers could only shake our heads. After about a year, the reality sank in even with the managers: it’s now just called ‘The Store.’ Happily, however, our university library’s “real” book collection continues to increase along with digital acquisitions. (Maybe they bought books from UvA.)
I don’t read Mike Chisholm as extolling that, but rather mourning a sad trend in some libraries.
Bare ruin’d choirs.
Once upon a time in a uni far away, an engineer provost deflected a library concern as a mere “detail.”
STEM, now lemon-freshened with AI, and humanities may do well to coexist.
40 years ago when I was an undergrad I spent a fair number of hours toiling (for pay, not for love of the game …) in the basement of one now-demolished piece of the university’s sprawling multi-building library infrastructure. That particular basement housed our then-rapidly-expanding collection of various dull-but-worthy publications generated by the UN, the EEC (not yet the EU …), and the Canadian government (Statistics Canada, to be precise). The collection steadily expanded by several shelf-feet per week (shelved by me), although back then there was a lot of that basement that was still empty to provide room for future acquisitions.
I imagine that the vast majority of that stuff is now produced only in digital or online form and you would have to print out a hard copy if for some reason you wanted one. OTOH, if the pace of new hard-copy acquisitions slows because less of the new things a research library wants/needs come in that format, the pressure to prune the old hard-copy archives should in principle diminish somewhat?
The original post includes this: the well-established fact that digital books are much more vulnerable than physical ones
Is that really a well-established fact? I have spent quite a few hours at the Library of Congress on various projects I was researching. In one case, I was pleased to discovered they had physical copies of newspapers from the 1860s that were of relevance. They were kept in sturdy, newspaper-sized boxes. But when I opened them, I was shocked to find that the paper had become so brittle and yellowed that it had disintegrated into confetti. Completely unreadable.
On another occasion, I wanted to look at scientific papers from the early 20th C. These were in well-known journals that the library claimed to possess. But when I went to the shelves, the volumes I needed were missing. I was told by one of the librarians that they had been stolen, because some of the papers had a modest value on the open market.
If the Library of Congress can’t look after its collections, I fear for the safety of items in smaller libraries. Of course, digital publications aren’t immune to decay, but it seems far from obvious that physical items are guaranteed to survive better.
To David L.’s point, newspapers aren’t “physical books.” Precisely because they were not intended to be other than ephemeral, they were originally printed on cheaper paper that was not a stable long-term storage medium. Are “high-quality” hardback books of the last century printed on paper with the long-term stability of the paper that surviving incunabula is printed on? I’ve heard different stories on that, and am not an expert.
Somewhere in my attic are some digital versions of various documents I worked on decades ago embedded in floppy disks that I no longer own hardware that can make use of. No doubt there are obscure specialists out there who have the right decoding hardware/software, although whether the disks would still be readable or have instead themselves degraded like old newspaper is a different question.
@David L
I suppose the alternative is to make facsimiles (obviously not original, so no one will steal them) and store the originals in a vault. If necessary, the vault can be opened and the originals examined or sold.
his new acquaintance seems to have not known that historians existed. I’m surprised you’re surprised DM is surprised.
Yes, this case might be not be figurative solipsism, it might just be plain ignorance. And I would not be surprised to discover a significant percentage of the population is unaware that “historian” is a real profession. 40% of Americans did not read a single book in 2025. If you have never gone to college and your world consists of social media, television and interactions with peers who also don’t read books, what awareness would you actually have of the profession “historian”? I can imagine even people who have STEM or business degress might not be aware that you can do “history” as a job beyond teaching about the Founders and the Alamo in high school. People in Venture Capital seem to think the idea of learning history is ridiculous (at least if posts on LinkedIn are to be believed, don’t look at LinkedIn).
I assume most people are at least aware of history as a class you take in high school, but a history teacher is a teacher not a “historian”, at least in the common mind.
The fact that the History Channel still exists would suggest I am exaggerating, but on the other hand there isn’t much “History” to be found on the History Channel.
Some of us find that a certain amount of use of screens etc. is not that good for eyes, hands and mind. Paper media is a relief. I’ve scanned a lot of stuff, but I make sure to keep physical backups of some that would take some hunting to re-find if they weren’t here. In some cases I’ve made paper copies of books or articles that I can’t physically keep. I’m tired of being thrown under the bus just because someone is in a huge rush to get something new, new, new. Accessibility and the need for it takes many forms.
I realize that shrinking budgets hurt everyone, and have no simple answer–that is printable, anyway.
Thank goodness for used bookstores, and little free libraries.
The existence of history does not logically entail the (present) existence of historians. I mean, we already know what happened in history because it’s already all written down in books in the library, innit? If you have a weird niche interest like the economic history of medieval Burma there’s probably a three-volume magisterial account of it published by Cambridge University Press in 1955, rendering any further employment in that niche superfluous.
This isn’t like linguistics. History is a school subject as mentioned, there are museums about it, there are monuments and holidays and the like; even if you don’t know there are people who study the past as a profession, how do you manage to imagine there isn’t somebody who’s interested in it?
(Trump is beside the point. He doesn’t merely believe he’s normal and project himself into other people. Instead, his condition is not common at all: he’s a genuine narcissist – not only does he believe he’s the best of everything in the history of ever and doesn’t need to learn anything because he’s already figured out everything worth knowing by virtue of being both a very stable genius and an extremely stable genius, he also believes it is self-evident that that’s what he is, so something must be majorly wrong with anyone who doesn’t act accordingly. …Uh. Tell me if I shouldn’t have packed all of that into a single sentence.)
“it is even more disheartening to see an academic librarian like Mike Chisholm extolling the disadvantages of those physical collections as “the real, actual educational benefit of using a research library.””
Um, that is a very curious (and wrong) reading of the first sentence of my little rant. If I need to spell it out (and: Irony Alert), I’m saying that — whatever lasting value an undergraduate or postgraduate degree course may bestow — the *real* value lies in learning to struggle with the sorts of difficulty we, as over-helpful librarians, have smoothed out by providing one-stop online lookup tools to catalogues, databases, repositories, and the Web in general.
Full disclosure: as a sometime consultant and implementer of library systems I am one of the guilty parties… It seemed like a good idea at the time, and was fun to do. I expect the AI people feel much the same just now about their attempts to put everyone else out of work. Give it a few years, and they, too, may regret what they have done. “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment…”
Here’s a recent news story about a widely-used online reference work suddenly vanishing from sight along with its archives, to the disadvantage of those who had not been so prudent as to back up local copies of the whole thing (which might have been a hassle). Annual hard-copy editions stopped being published about a decade ago, per other sources.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/us/cia-world-factbook-countries-cec
@Mike Chisholm: I’m afraid that I did understand what you meant. And I find it disheartening to hear what you think the “real” value of working with research libraries was.
@Vanya: I don’t know it works in the Netherlands or other countries, but I can’t imagine anyone who went to college in the U.S. being unaware that their college has a history department and the people who teach there are scholars of history.
As for people who didn’t go to college, well, there are all levels of intellectual disability, so certainly there are people who don’t know there are historians. And I can imagine someone who dropped out of junior high to be a full-time drug addict, maybe especially an immigrant who didn’t learn much in school in their original country (maybe because of disruptions that led the family to emigrate) and then didn’t learn enough of the new country’s language to get anything out of school in their new country, and have been living on the streets and don’t even know who Indiana Jones is, but do such people start conversations with professors in cafes?
(No, David M., you didn’t put too much information into that sentence.)
As for that 40% who didn’t read a book in 2025, I’ll admit that I once mentioned to some students (at the gym of the college I worked at then) that I liked to read, and one young man said no one should read for pleasures, the way someone might say that no one should root for the Pittsburgh Steelers or no adult should enjoy My Little Pony. But I feel sure he knew that historians exist.
@Jerry F.: There are plenty of colleges in the U.S. that do not have a freestanding history department so labeled, even if they may have a few professors who would fit into such a department elsewhere. They may be in a Department of History and X, or a Department of X, History, and Z,* or something vaguer like “Department of Humanities and Social Studies.” There are even fairly high-prestige universities like that attended by Brett where at any given moment there may be only zero-to-one undergraduates actually majoring in history, so that if that’s you you are for that reason notable enough to get written up in the newspaper. https://thetech.com/2023/12/14/21h-major
Whether the typical undergrad in such schools has much grasp as to what it is that history professors supposedly do that high school social-studies teachers don’t is not clear to me.
*I checked out the current website of a second-tier public university in Pennsylvania that once fired a college classmate of mine despite her tenure via the clever expedient of eliminating her entire discipline.** The successor institution now boasts a “Department of Criminal Justice, History and Politics.” Probably the parse that has “Criminal” modifying “History” and “Politics” is wrong?
**She landed on her feet at a second-tier public university in a formerly Confederate state with a more expansive range of disciplines that have survived and retained funding.
Brett, you have misrepresented what Mike Chisholm wrote, twice.
@DM, it’s ambiguous to be sure but I read that passage to mean the woman in the café couldn’t imagine why the job of historian exists and how anyone could do something so economically useless as a living. I have certainly met many people in the business and tech worlds who make similar remarks about majoring in history. I assume she could at least grasp that some odd people might be interested in history as a hobby.
Having more or less continually taught at (several geographically far-flung and rather dissimilar) post-secondary institutions throughout North America for the past three decades or so, the “presentist” mentality denounced by Hanegraaff is so ubiquitous not only among students but among younger faculty as well that I am very surprised that people can be incredulous about its existence.
What nobody has mentioned yet is the fact that on-line publications wholly belie the old Roman proverb “Verba volant, scripta manent”. A writer or government agency would find it impossible (or at least phenomenally difficult) to replace all printed copies of their book(s) or publication(s) worldwide in order to adjust (various) statements or figures to bring them in line with whatever doxa became popular after the publication + dissemination of the work in question. With on-line publishing? Such Orwellian re-writing of the past becomes easy. Too easy. MUCH too easy.
So easy indeed that I have heard (informally) about a government department in a certain capital (De cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, if I may quote a former slave writing in slightly modernized and dialectal Latin) which requires certain documents (with official statistics) only available on-line to regularly be printed and then physically stored (with the date of the printing clearly indicated) to ward against the danger of said on-line statistics being re-written as a result of orders from above.
@Stephen Goranson,
Thanks for the suggestion. Yes Duke, at least back to Bruce Wardropper days, has been strong in Spanish studies. I am not writing off my alma mater, but the original post prompts me to verify their plans before offering a gift.
https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/rauner
@cuchuflete. https://www.bne.es/es/quijote/
Gracias, M.
“She just couldn’t fathom that somebody would be interested in the past” is the quote I reacted to. I can of course easily imagine that this interpretation of what she actually said is wrong; but we aren’t shown most of what she said, so the interpretation is all I have to work with.
Not if anybody has copies.
That’s why the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature has come out and issued an Opinion clarifying the fact that retracting a paper has no nomenclatural consequences whatsoever, no matter if it was ever printed…
It’s also, frankly, why so many Epstein files have been published, even if in redacted form: there are copies, so pretending they don’t exist or tampering with them is not an option in the somewhat longer term. For starters, DOGE has downloaded everything.
But especially when the online document does not disappear altogether (which would call attention to the issue) but is instead subtly edited/modified without any announcement that this is a new/different/updated edition, the reader both has to affirmatively figure out that that has happened or affirmatively suspect that it may have happened and then figure out who in the world may happen to have a cached copy downloaded at exactly the prior point in time of interest. Doable in theory, often hard in practice, and certainly requiring a variation on the skill set praised by Mike Chisholm.
Indeed in my line of work whenever we find something that might be useful on the website of someone our client is suing we have a paralegal save a download or screenshot or what have you, because the same URL may subsequently instead lead to a silently modified version that is less worrisome for the other side’s lawyers. (I have a lawsuit I’m working on right now where indeed someone affiliated with the other side “updated” or “corrected” a chart on their website after we submitted a pdf of a prior version to the court while noting that that then-current version tended to contradict an argument they were now making in the lawsuit. But if they’d “updated” before we found the prior version we might well never have learned about it.)
@Etienne:
Having more or less continually taught at (several geographically far-flung and rather dissimilar) post-secondary institutions throughout North America for the past three decades or so, the “presentist” mentality denounced by Hanegraaff is so ubiquitous not only among students but among younger faculty as well that I am very surprised that people can be incredulous about its existence.
I haven’t encountered that presentist mentality in about the same time teaching in two post-secondary institutions, rather similar to each other and maybe very different from yours (community colleges in northern New Mexico), but I’ll take your word for it. What surprises me is not that mentality but that someone met in a cafe had it so strongly and so ignorantly that she was literally dumbfounded to learn that someone was a historian.
@J.W. B.: Indeed, in my college, history is taught in the Liberal Arts Department (much as physics is taught in the Science Department). But I’m pretty sure the students know there are historians. Maybe with the exception of some of those getting certificates in various skilled tra0des?
@cuchuflete. You should expect that there will be negotiations. They will want to see a bibliography so that they can see which publications you have and they do not. Those of course will be desired.
If both you and they have the same ones, they will want to know about physical condition because yours may be in better condition.
Or they might want to have duplicates of certain ones even if they have better copies (in order to keep their copies as conservation copies) or for trading with other libraries.
You will have to decide whether you want a special bookplate or not.
On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the death of Cervantes the BNE digitalized its entire collection of works by and about him (https://cervantes.bne.es/es/colecciones) and as new acquisitions come in, they too become available online. A buen entendedor….
“Spoon feeding? You’re kidding me: this is more like force-feeding geese for foie gras…”
Imagine being this high-and-mighty about scholarship, and not knowing the word “gavage.” What does that even feel like?
I personally find that both electronic publications and paper have their advantages. It’s a matter of usability and cognitive utility. If I need to have a half-dozen open books in front of me, I find it easier if they are paper. I have had a paper book and a pdf of the same work simultaneously open, one for easier reading, one for easier searching. Libraries are a natural for that. If there’s a paper I need to chew on for a long time and get into every detail of it, I might print it out.
not knowing the word “gavage.” — non-use of that word might have been from conscious choice rather than ignorance: for example to pair* “spoon feeding” with “force-feeding”.
*I of course know the specific Greek rhetorical term, but choose not to use it, for reasons #2, #5, and #6.
I recall making a comparison between the conduct of a certain African statesman and the behaviour of one of the more regrettable Roman emperors to the wife of a fellow aid worker: her response was “but that was all a long time ago.”
In retrospect, my comparison was not in fact very apt; but the lady evidently felt that trying to draw any kind of analogies from the past to the present was merely stupid. History is bunk.
I personally find that both electronic publications and paper have their advantages.
Yes, there shouldn’t be any question of that, but a lot of people seem to feel that paper is obsolete.
“Imagine being this high-and-mighty about scholarship, and not knowing the word “gavage.” What does that even feel like?”
High and mighty about scholarship? WTF?? I sometimes despair of being understood… Is it my excessive British love of irony? Or perhaps some commenters here have not used an academic library in some time? Whatever, I’ll get me coat.
Our university’s book store recently switched over to selling virtually nothing but clothes. We old-timers could only shake our heads. After about a year, the reality sank in even with the managers: it’s now just called ‘The Store.’
The Indiana University “bookstore” should follow suit; I spent a very frustrating time in it a few weeks ago (first visit in a good while), and all I was looking for was notebook paper, which I eventually found in a half-hidden alcove.
The Indiana University “bookstore” should follow suit
The SOAS one closed altogether some years ago, though to be fair that only means you have to walk five minutes further to Waterstones. At least Heffers is still doing fine last I checked.
Oddly, I don’t recall there ever having been a bookshop associated with INALCO; for your foreign language book needs you have to go to completely different neighborhoods of Paris.
Whatever, I’ll get me coat.
Just ignore the jerky comment — I don’t know whether it was because of misunderstanding or just a bad attitude, but I assure you nobody else felt that way. I’ve been enjoying your remarks.
the lady evidently felt that trying to draw any kind of analogies from the past to the present was merely stupid. History is bunk.
Coincidence? I’ve just gotten a YouTube advert for Paladin education app
(The particular story they featured was the Iran-Contra Reagan denying all knowledge, whilst I was watching the New Statesman podcast on Starmer denying all knowledge. Much better targeting than most YouTube intrusions.)
denying all knowledge
Yes. “Don’t blame me, I’m only incompetent.”
“then … he is too stupid to be a Prime Minister.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01b77rk
@de
“This content is not available in your location”, so no hearing the clip (or the John Wyndham interview).
If what Starmer is denying knowledge of is his (soon to be ex-Lord) colleague’s ties to Epstein, I don’t see why you class that as incompetence or grounds for the comparison to Eden. Is Kier Starmer planning to follow in Blair’s footsteps and invade another country (maybe send a Naval Task Force, complete with nuclear-armed sub, to Greenland…)?
I don’t see why you class that as incompetence
Because (assuming, magnanimously, that he really didn’t know), it was his business to know. Failure to know something like this (which was not, in fact, difficult to find out at the time, in the Mandelson case) implies a basic lack of competence – or diligence – in his executive role. (Reagan, likewise.)
In the case of both, one would have thought better* of them if they’d said: “Yes, I did know, but in this harsh real world, such decisions may be necessary and justifiable and it’s my job to take them, no matter how repellent they may appear.”
Eden is similar only in having been genuinely incompetent**: the nature of his incompetence was quite different. (Also, I like the Bevan clip.) But Starmer and Reagan were pretty clearly merely claiming incompetence as an excuse. This may not be as rhetorically effective as they might have hoped.
* Not well; but better, at least.
** There were actually medical reasons which partly excuse him. (The full story has been passed down orally by UK surgeons, but the general outline is a matter of public record.)
Reminds me of the punchline from a stern Scots Presbyterian sermon:
[Sinners in Hell]: We didna ken! We didna ken!
[Satan]: Och weel, ye ken noo.
My first distinct memory of television news, aged eight, is that of a man’s face, harshly lighted against a dark background. I remember it because I was disturbed: I’d never seen a grownup look so stricken before. I know now that I was seeing Anthony Eden resigning after Suez.
There was a kerfluffle in the Danish parliament because the relevant minister had ascended to its august platform and denied that his decision to send Danish troops to some US-led war had been at the request of the US. Of course the opposition hadn’t forgotten when the US made the emails public some 10 or 15 years later. It might have been better to say “if they did, it’s for me to know only. That’s what diplomacy means. If any of you lot can become Minister of Defence, you’ll know too. But you won’t be allowed to tell.”
Surely Danish troops would only have been sent off to some foreign war by command of Queen Margarethe, perhaps after she had received advice from her ministers of course.
@JWB, formally, yes. But this is a constitutional monarchy, the government are to blame for any bad decision. (But they prefer to take the credit for what they see as good decisions. The monarch is required to keep their mouth shut and not express an opinion).