The Rights Issues of Digital Preservation in the Digital Era :: Preservation Access Library Science

The Rights Issues of digital Preservation in the Digital Era Not long ago, Anthony Grafton, the elevated Princeton historian, published a history of the footnote. An intellectual tool that is the humanists rough equivalent of the scientists report on data, the footnote offers the confirmable support for stories told and arguments presented. No doubt we all remember our own experiences of admiration and wonder when we learned how to interpret a footnote and so began to find out the mechanics of scholarly reference. However, according to Grafton, no one has described the substance that footnotes educate better than Harry Belafonte, who recently told the story of his early contemplateing material of W. E. B. DuBois. As a childlike West Indian sailor, Belafonte learned to read critically when he figured out how the footnote opened a world of learning. I discovered, Belafonte said, that at the end of some sentences thither was a number and if you looked at the foot of the page the reference was to what it was all intimatelywhat source DuBois gleaned his information from. However, Belafonte did not find the task of learning from references to be easy at first and was stymied by the methods that DuBois used to cite his references. severe to track them down, he says that he went to a library in bread with a long list of books. The librarian said, thats too many, young man. Youre going to have to cut it down. I said, I gage make it very easy. Just give me everything you got by Ibid. She said, on that points no such writer. I called her a racist. I said, argon you trying to keep me in darkness? And I walked out of at that place angry.. Of course, footnotes are not the only or, in a variety of explore and educational contexts, even the best method of reference. Moreover, as the Belafonte story indicates, there can be many obstacles in tracing down a reference path. However, as Grafton concludes in his study, the footnote is a critical break down of the scholarly apparatus because it is such a clear and efficient mechanism to link one piece of scholarship with what its author has identified as the key reference points for the work. It serves as a guarantee, Grafton says, that statements about the past reach from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust those statements (Grafton 1997 vii, 233-235).