manuscripts don't burn

My sabbatical is officially over. In a few days I will leave Harvard and its colossal Widener library, and return to San Diego, to my own books with my own handwriting in their margins, and to UCSD's Geisel library, a building named after Dr. Suess and made famous by Steven Spielberg, who inventively cast it as an alien spaceship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". UCSD's Slavic holdings are decent, and inter-UC loans are relatively fast, but they have nothing on Widener's Slavic collection, including the largest Ukrainian holdings outside Kyiv.

Happily, I get to take a lot of Harvard's library with me. And a lot of Stanford's, Michigan's and New York's libraries with me. And I can search their contents. In multiple languages. My greatest use of Google's digital library project over the past several months, as I have prepared my own manuscript for publication, has been checking page numbers and citations in older editions. A year or two ago this would have involved several trips to different libraries. Books that once would have taken weeks to arrive through interlibrary loan I can now download through "Полный просмотр". I have also used Google Books for hours of browsing (which inevitably leads to buying).

Some of my colleagues would question my optimism about Google, a company that, doomsayers warn us, threatens to track our whereabouts and digitize our daydreams. But Google's aspiration toward omniscience and creative experimentation with organizational algorithms promises to make literary texts accessible to a vast population of readers in the United States and abroad.

In a few weeks a "fairness hearing" will assess the settlement Google Books has reached to ensure publishers and authors adequate compensation. I will be relieved when this date has passed and I am assured continued access to Google's digitized treasures. In the mean time, I will return to my office in San Diego and unpack my own library. And in the process I will unearth the old xeroxed copy of Walter Benjamin's 1931 "Unpacking my Library" I once absentmindedly stuck between a couple of volumes while in college, and which has remained a kind of inside joke with Benjamin as I have packed and unpacked it with my books ever since. "I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order." (Benjamin, "Selected Writings, V. 2," Cambridge, MA: 1999, 486)

(I am not yet home with my boxes and shelves, and therefore have yet to unpack my old copy of this essay; I looked this passage up on Google Books.)

Update: For a collective discussion of this issue, see my and others' notes to the editor in the Chronicle of Higher Education.