Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burke, Peter. 2000. A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. Cambridge: PolityPress.

Eisentein hightlights the role of the priting pres as an agent of social change by adoting a historical approach that investigates the shift from script to print. She studies the implition of this transformtion on three time periods specifically: the Reinassance, the Reformtion, and the rise of moder science. One of the central thoughts of the book is what Eisenstein terms the 'Unacknowledged Revolution; that took place after the invention of the printing press, a time when public access to print media facilitated the growth of public knowledge and formulation of individual thought. Another achievement of print was the standardization and preservation of previous knowledge, which was a much more challenging endeavor in the manuscript generation. According to Eisenstein, this shift marked a crucial step in the development of humankind. By focusing on dissemination, standardization, preservation, and their effects on historical processes, Eisenstein provides a coherent argument about the social effects of the historical transition to the print medium.

Besser provides a history of digital libraries and argues for their continued importance in humanities disciplines. Libraries, archives, and museums can use high quality digital surrogates of original material from different repositories so that they appear to be catalogued within the same collection. The author notes that libraries have long upheld ethical traditions, clientele service, stewardship, and sustainability in addition to facilitating use of their collections. Besser details the philosophies of metadata. To correct current problems facing digital libraries, the author suggests that web architecture should no longer violate conventional library practices of providing relative location information for a work, as this impinges on the ability of users to access the material.

Besser, Howard. 2004. “The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Libraries.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, 557–75, Oxford: Blackwell.

Burke discusses the various agents and elements of social knowledge production with a specific focus on intellectuals and Europe in the early modern period (until c. 1750). He argues that knowledge is always plural and that various types of knowledge develop, surface, intersect, and play concurrently. Burke relies on sociology, including the work of Émile Durkheim, and critical theory, including the work of Michel Foucault,as a basis to develop his own notions of social knowledge production. He acknowledges that the church, scholarly institutions, the government, and the printing press have all had a significant effect on knowledge production and dissemination, often affirmatively but occasionally through restriction or containment. Furthermore, Burke explores how both ‘heretics’ (humanist revolutionaries) and more conventional academic structures developed the university as a knowledge institution.