TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION: University of Manchester: Building an ‘arts lab’ fuelled by the appliance of science

Description

In an age where even ancient texts and artefacts are becoming instantly accessible to researchers via online images, should university libraries accept that only mites and spiders are likely to continue frequenting their special collections?

Not according to Peter Pormann, founding director of the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Research Institute, housed at the university’s historic John Rylands Library. He notes that when organisations such as Google scan documents and books, they prefer “clean copies”, which lack “all the annotations and richness” of real books.