When University of Virginia (UVA) professor Andrew Stauffer sent his class to the library in the fall of 2009, he expected them to focus on the printed text of the books they brought back. But Stauffer and his students soon realized that was just one story being told in these volumes. While looking at nineteenth-century copies of work by Felicia Hemens, a poet widely beloved at the time for her sentimental verse, the students were immediately drawn to everything else happening in these books; not just the expected underlining and dog-ears, but bookplates, diary entries, letters, quotes, pressed flowers, and readers own poetic flights of fancy.
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In this way, Book Traces celebrates what Stauffer calls bibliodiversity; appreciating each book as its own object with its own life and history. "We're fighting against the idea that once you've digitized a single copy, then you don't need others,: says Stauffer.COMMENT
The Book Traces project is not anti-digitization, but it it does show the limitations of treating books as merely texts. The article describes how the kinds of books that the Book Traces project seeks are specifically targeted for weeing because they are old, beat up and not rare.
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