Resumen de Out of Print: The Orphans of Mass Digitization
In the 2000s an interconnected set of elite projects in the United States sought to digitize �all books in all languages� and make them available online. These mass digitization projects were efforts to absorb the print book infrastructure into a new one centered in computer networks. Mass book digitization has now faded from view, and here I trace its setbacks through a curious figure�the �orphan��that emerged from within these projects and acted ultimately as an agent of impasse. In legal policy debates, an �orphan� refers to a copyrighted work whose owner cannot be found, but its history, range of meanings, and deployments reveal it to be considerably more complex. Based on fieldwork conducted at a digital library engaged in mass digitization, this paper analyzes the �orphan� as a personifying metaphor that digital library activists embraced in order to challenge and/or disrupt the social relations that adhere in and around books. The figure of the orphan haunts the techno-cultural infrastructural project of mass digitization, and stands, I argue, as a disenchanted emblem for �the book� in suspension between a disfavored past and a fantasized future.
