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 distinguished Princeton historian, published a history of the footnote. An intellectual tool that is â€Å"the humanist’s rough equivalent of the scientist’s report on data,† the footnote offers â€Å"the empirical support for stories told and arguments presented.† No doubt we all remember our own experiences of awe and wonder when we learned how to interpret a footnote and so began to understand the mechanics of scholarly reference. However, according to Grafton, â€Å"no one has described the way that footnotes educate better than Harry Belafonte, who recently told the story of his early reading of W. E. B. DuBois.† As a young West Indian sailor, Belafonte learned to read critically when he figured out how the footnote opened a world of learning. â€Å"I discovered,† Belafonte said, â€Å"that at the end of some sentences there was a number and if you looked at the foot of the page the reference was to what it was all about—what 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. Trying to track them down, he says that he went to a library in Chicago with a long list of books. â€Å"The librarian said, ‘that’s too many, young man. You’re going to have to cut it down.’ I said, ‘I can make it very easy. Just give me everything you got by Ibid.’ She said, ‘There’s no such writer.’ I called her a racist. I said, ‘Are you trying to keep me in darkness?â€⠄¢ And I walked out of there angry.†. Of course, footnotes are not the only or, in a variety of research 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 part 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, â€Å"that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust [those statements]† (Grafton 1997: vii, 233-235).