Will its traditional limits change?

It's 92 items of popculture (women's and handyman mags,light reads, TV trash, soft porn), not the sort of stuff 8212;scholarly, substantial that the library would normally wantto collect. It has a different sort of historical value, though, one Cowleysees as important. "It's healthy that libraries experiment and makedecisions about collecting some things without knowing fully orunderstanding how they'll be used," he says, admiring "thatslightly maverick moment that might open up another way oflooking". While the second snapshot was done in 1981, such collections arenow made by the library roughly every decade (the most recent waslast June, with 266 titles). One day in the future, the contents ofall these boxes might together form a fascinating exhibition,perhaps of a physical form (the printed magazine, the inkynewspaper) no longer in production as utterly archaic asclay tablets and rolls of papyrus. Cowley is fascinated to see howthis demise will play out. For the moment, though, the publications from 1975 that he pullsout of the boxes reveal a certain naive folksiness, in both designand content. Take a peek, for example, in an edition of Woman's Own of1975. It cost 35 cents and, like most women's magazines back then,tended to be domestically focused not on gourmet dinnerdishes and pricey interior design but on practical haberdashery,handicrafts and mending. Homemaking was everything, with theoccasional piece of romance fiction tossed in to spice thingsup. Cowley sees such women's magazines as a particularly goodbarometer of cultural change, marking, over the years of thecollection, the rise to dominance of images over words and, ofcourse, the prevalence of celebrity culture (which eventuallyerased the doityourself focus of yesteryear). In the 1975 and1981 snapshots, there is little evidence of rabid celebrityculture, though you can see an inkling of it in 1975's Woman'sWorld, also 35 cents, with the article "Christina Onassis: fromdaddy's little girl to ruler of an empire" (a piece, however, thatis studiously free of gossip and innuendo). Rosetta Stone German "But then you see the appearance of a magazine such asWho!, which was probably one of the first to eradicate thepretence that they're interested in anything else but blatant, rawcelebrity," says Cowley. "You can chart the growth in celebrityculture to the extent that the faces are now instantlyrecognisable to almost all of us that was certainly not thecase in '75 or '81." When interviewed, Cowley had just been at a national conferenceof rarebooks librarians, which featured much discussion about howthe electronic age will affect the very concept of what a book is.Will its traditional limits change? Will it remain an impermeabletext or become interactive, malleable, collaborative? "Whendoes it stop being a book?" asks Cowley. "When does it breakdown?" Such changes have already begun to affect the traditionalboundaries of what constitutes newspapers and magazines, whosepaperbased physical forms often embody quite differentsensibilities to their online versions, which appeal to differentmarkets. Will the userpays versions, based on active, inthefieldjournalism (rather than parasitic cutandpaste methods), survive Google CEO Eric Schmidt says he needs them to orwill they degenerate into a miasma of free online newsbites,excessive imagery and uninformed, shootfromthehip blogs, theirvalue determined by "hits"? Will the critical drawcards of goodjournalism experience, informed analysis and intelligentreflection be abandoned? Psychologist and social researcher Hugh Mackay is bewildered athow newspapers in particular have handled the challenge of changingreading habits and demands.

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