Class in Review: Week 6

So in my reflection on the readings I focused more on the Socratic seminars, but in class the more interesting discussion seemed to center around book clubs. I found our discussions about perceptions (or stereotypes) of book clubs and typical demographics of book clubs really interesting. In thinking about this more over the course of the week, I had some more general reflections on books and the future of books and reading.

I keep wondering about the future of book clubs in a world in which books are increasingly being seen by a lot of people as unnecessary and not useful as sources of information. But as we all know, books themselves aren't going anywhere, even if their physical forms are changing. One thing that I realized is that the nature of books has in a way narrowed-- fifty years ago, books were the best source for many different types of information. Today, a lot of that information is found online, or in databases, or in much more readily available sources. Even a lot of fiction or more literary non-fiction can be read online in forms that aren't like e-books. So what remains for books? Essentially, we've come (back?) to a point where books are in a way more a source of enjoyment and pleasure than they are a source of "information" in the sense of factual knowledge about the world. This is true, generally speaking, whether we're talking about fiction or non-fiction. I would think that really, this would be good for book clubs! People see books and reading as an activity that's reserved mostly for pleasurable parts of our lives and free time, not as something that has to be consulted in the course of serious work-- there are plenty of other sources for that. So book clubs that just focus on reading for the fun of it really have a new opportunity to market themselves, right? Maybe. I feel like a lot of other people have probably said this all before more eloquently than I. But I'm enjoying thinking about this stuff as someone who's primarily been thinking about archives and preservation in my time at SI.

In the comments my last post, my fellow archivist Naomi wondered if book clubs could be an effective outreach tool for archives, and I thought I'd address that here to see if anybody else had any thoughts. I agree   that a lot of regular lecture attendees would attend a book club-like discussion of materials. I also thought about whether featuring discussion of works written using research done at an archives could yield interesting results; it also might be a case of being able to get some input from authors, with whom you already have a relationship thanks to their research. The tricky thing would be finding a work that would really engage people, and not just an academic tome. And even then, it might or might not work. The biggest challenge to something like this is the biggest challenge to any outreach for archives, though; most archives don't have nearly the staffing, funding, or focus on outreach that libraries do, and most archivists are so busy that they don't really have time to think about new outreach activities, especially something as elaborate as a book discussion. But it would be an interesting avenue to explore. Any thoughts?