that some may want to see destroyed. In the physical world, cultural memory and cultural heritage institutions have all too often been targets in wars between nations, or in efforts to suppress or control specific populations within a nation. In the digital world these cultural memory institutions can be attacked without crossing the firebreaks into open warfare. Effective stewardship of special collections in the digital age will include not just expertise in the curatorial arts and in digital preservation, but also in information security and information warfare, national and international law, diplomacy and public policy. 1 The characterization of the library as laboratory is not new: Christopher Columbus Langdell, appointed Dean of the Harvard Law School in 1870, used it in his “Harvard Celebration Speech,” Law Quarterly Review 3 (1887): 123. I am indebted to Professor Roy Mersky of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law for educating me in the history of this. 2 Until fairly recently, it has been near-universal practice to refer to these digital representations of physical objects as “digital surrogates,” a faintly pejorative, sneering phrase that suggests their systematic and intrinsic inferiority to the source physical objects this is often accompanied by rhetoric implying that real scholars always need to work with the originals. As I will argue, this is no longer true, at least in a universal and straightforward way, and I’ve preferred the more neutral term “digital representation” here. I’m grateful to Greg Crane of the Perseus Project at Tufts University for reminding me of the importance of getting the terminology on this right. 3 See “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (third version, 1939), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–1940, (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003): 251–283. Note that other translations of versions of this article have used the perhaps- more-familiar title “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 4 This is not simply a result of our current ability to take very high-resolution images of manuscripts that are too fragile to handle, though one can readily find endless examples of these today. Very large objects such as sculptures or even buildings can be scanned by lasers to produce extraordinarily high- quality representations. For example, about a decade ago Marc Levoy and colleagues at Stanford University took highly detailed laser measurements of Michelangelo’s David the quality was such that the Italian government would not permit the release of the full data set on the Internet however, the Stanford researchers built a system that allowed viewing of details of specific parts of the statue, including parts that would be inaccessible to a normal museum visitor. See David Koller and Marc Levoy, “Protecting 3D Graphics Content,” Communications of the ACM 48, no. 6 (June 2005): 74–80 for the general Michelangelo imaging project, see http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/mich/. A more recent example, also by coincidence involving Michelangelo, is the Young Archer statue from the French Embassy’s New York Office for Cultural Services. There’s a debate about whether this marble is the work of Michelangelo, and it has gone on 10-year loan for display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has given the embassy a very high-quality three-dimensional copy as a placeholder. See James Barron, “A Statue for a Statue…Sort Of,” New York Times City Room Blog, October 13, 2009, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/a-statue-for-a-statue-sort-of/ and Ken Johnson, “Met Asks if Statue Is Work of Genius,” New York Times, November 6, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/arts/design/06archer.html. 5 See also Reviel Netz and William Noel, The Archimedes Palimpsest: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist (Philadelphia: Da Capa Press, 2007) and the Web site http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/. While perhaps the most extensive work has been done in restoring damaged manuscripts and in the study of paintings, the range of opportunities for the creative application of image processing are enormous. For example, by digitizing photographic negatives, it is possible to manipulate the dynamic range of the image to see details that are invisible in the historical prints that accompanied the negatives (a frequently cited project in this area is the work with the glass negatives of the Solomon D. Butcher collection by the Nebraska State Historical Society as part of the Library of Congress American Memory Program). We are beginning to understand that while photographs can be treated as images, photographic negatives might best be though of as data sets—much like the data sets produced by today’s digital cameras in RAW format— that are intrinsically technologically mediated in their use through this mediation, a digitized negative can produce many different images. RLI 267 8 Special Collections at the Cusp of the Digital Age: A Credo ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC Effective stewardship of special collections in the digital age will include not just expertise in the curatorial arts and in digital preservation, but also in information security and information warfare, national and international law, diplomacy and public policy.