Reading and Scanning
Reading and scanning are the quiet engines of academic work: knowledge only becomes truly usable when it can be found, copied, and shared. That practice takes shape both in objects that were once part of everyday campus life and in the books and series that sustained the act of reading itself.
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The microfiche reader - a heavy device with lamp, lenses, and projection screen—made thousands of miniature pages legible while at the same time protecting fragile originals: research quite literally meant 'bringing to light' and patiently moving through texts page by page. At the other end of the spectrum is the Kaiser OMR 35S, a forms reader that does not read text but recognises optical marks, rapidly turning stacks of answer sheets or questionnaires into data - a tangible reminder of how teaching and administration once scaled through paper. And then there are the sources that shaped generations of lawyers: the Pasicrisie belge, with Court of Cassation case law in the Limburg Law Library reaching back to the nineteenth century, and the Journal des Tribunaux, which has brought together legal doctrine and case law on a weekly basis since 1881. Together, these objects tell a single story: reading and scanning are not merely technical processes, but an academic practice that helps us preserve, test, and pass on knowledge. |
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