Digital bibliography and the irish book trades

As the technology that records and stores our cultural heritage increasingly moves from bibliographical to digital media, what do we do with the books? This concern is a reflection of Jerome McGanns injunction that the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures. What is lost in the process of converting an individual book into a digital surrogate is a topic that has received much attention in recent years, even if the conclusions of this enquiry have not always been heeded by those in the business of digitising books. The opportunities and challenges of this remediation are evident in examining the history of digital resources such as Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), which are crucial to eighteenth-century studies. What that history also reveals is that for as long as there have been books, there have been lists of books. In our focus on how digitisation variously enriches and imperils the integrity of the material book and its diverse modes of signification, we risk missing similar opportunities and challenges represented by the digitisation of quantitative records of the book trades: book lists, directories, and catalogues.