Page 4 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

INTRODUCTION
AS a rare book dealer, collector and bibliographer specializing in the history of medicine, science and technology, I tend to view the rapidly changing present through the lens of the past, especially the bookish past. When the personal computer came along and began to be pervasive in society, I studied the history of computing through collecting and researching some of the key documents in the foundation of the science of computing and the computing industry.1 The more I studied the history of computing, the more I was sure that somehow the changes in the cre- ation, distribution and storage of information, and the problems of infor- mation overload that we experience today had antecedents. Thinking about the early history of printing, I wondered whether our time is much like the transition from the manuscript to print that occurred after Gutenberg in- vented printing by movable type in mid-fifteenth century Germany. Initially I was convinced enough in the similarity to draw such a conclusion in my anthology From Gutenberg to the Internet, published in 2005. Once that book was published, and I continued my researches, the comparison between the fifteenth century and today appeared less obvious and more complicated.
To continue my researches, I approached the issue as a collector of histori- cal facts, adding details to a timeline that I initially wrote in word processing files, and eventually as a database built as a website. Collecting facts for this database took me into different topics in the history of books and media, as my reading in print and on the web expanded. I have always learned best from writing, so the first couple of thousand database entries were a lot like reading notes kept in chronological order and indexed by subject. Later, as
1 Hook, Diana & Norman, Jeremy M. Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking and Telecommunications. Novato: historyofscience.com, 2002.
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