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The Nineteenth-Century Archive in the Digital Age

What will the nineteenth-century archive look like as it emerges from the coming decade of digitization? This essay looks at the changing nature of academic research libraries in the wake of Google Books. Out of copyright, often widely available, and frequently fragile due to poor paper quality, nineteenth-century printed books are both richly served and particularly imperiled in the new media ecosystem. As scenes of evidence, they are at once exposed and occluded by the digitization of our library collections. A massive horizon of opportunity is now opening for humanists to trace the history of language, ideas, books, and reading via automated searches and visualizations of the global digital library. Yet individual copies are under a general downward pressure in this new dispensation. In concert with the digital transformation of the archive, which will reveal wonders, we must also give sustained attention to the material record of nineteenth-century reading before it disappears from our academic research libraries for good.