Episode Two - Diana Lemberg

Thoughts and Feels

This episode's guest is Dr. Diana Lemberg, Assistant Professor of History at Lingnan University. Professor Lemberg is an expert in the history of freedom of information and its relationship to the United States’ global engagements after 1945. Her book Barriers Down: Freedom of Information and American Power is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

We live in an information age. For centuries information has been recorded, distributed and preserved through the medium of paper. The past century has seen movements away from paper as an information storage medium in favor of microfilm and digital resources. Dr. Lemberg shares her experience as an historian to highlight some of the costs of this transition from paper to other media--such as the practical and creative difficulties of dealing with non-paper resources, and the potential loss of information contained in historic papers as artefacts in and of themselves.

Learn More:

• Nicholson Baker - Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
• Jean-Noël Jeanneney - Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge
• On The Media - Digital Dark Age
• Ferris Jabr - The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens
• Simon Jakins - Books are back. Only the technodazzled thought they would go away