Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
It is 2003 and I am doing some research at the Library of Congress, the de facto national library for the United States and the largest library in the world. Next to me sit some articles I've printed off of online journals on the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's "Total Information Awareness Project," a plan, still in its formative stage, to throw a panopticon net of surveillance across the United States through a combination of "language translation technologies, data search and pattern recognition technologies, and advanced collaborative and decision support tools" (DARPA). But I am also doing research on Chad Oliver, an anthropologist and science fiction writer best known for stories and novels published in the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to DARPA's vision of the completely surveilled society, I am finding my researches into Chad Oliver a somewhat less than Foucaultian experience: 3 of the 6 call slips I hand in come back "Not on Shelf," the other three inform me that the primary texts from Oliver are in remote storage and will take several days to retrieve. Forced to abandon my research, I give myself to a kind of peevish reverie one sees often at the Library of Congress.
Repository Citation
Collins, Samuel G.. "Reading Over the Shoulder of the Future at the Library of Congress." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol4/iss1/2
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