Murphy suggests that racism and eugenics were behind the preservation-minded time capsules of the earlier twentieth century, and that “surveillance capitalism” and atomic war fatalism provided the impetus to develop microfilm. The entire history of preservation is in fact dubious. In the data complex, humans do still play a role, though only as “human biochips… embedded in the cyborg of the data complex” (180). He even relates the will to preserve-which in our field is axiomatic-to what he (following André Bazin) calls the “Mummy Complex” (7), updated to today’s world as the “data complex”: a vast, extrasomatic matrix that aspires to a kind of immortality independent of the human beings-us-who have given rise to it. Like the other outsiders mentioned, Brian Michael Murphy makes disturbing, heretical observations, among them that “he practice of data preservation is itself inherently toxic” (33) or that librarians “preserve through annihilation” (63). The author is also a poet and an essayist, not to mention dean of the college at Bennington. So now we have a book with “preserving data” in the subtitle that is decidedly not by a librarian, not even a digital librarian, but by a self-described “media archaeologist” (87). Schonfeld argue in Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization, brought down largely through the opposition of major library organizations, ALA, ARL, and ACRL. A final example, the pharaonic undertaking by two other outsiders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to create a universal digital library, was, as Deanna Marcum and Roger C.

Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose (1981) was nothing if not a roman à clef about the perfidy of librarians hoarding secrets-which of course we know we never do. Henry Petroski, an engineer, wrote Book on the Bookshelf (1999), looking at the practical construction principles of bookshelves through history, and was never taken seriously by librarians-perhaps also in light of his (joking?) recommendations to arrange books on bookshelves by the author’s first name, or by the first letter of the second-to-last word of the title. Librarians tend to look askance at commentators on their work and profession from outside the guild.

In the name of the rose book