LIS 688D�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ���������� Jonathan Eaker Article Review   Drueke, Jeanetta. �St. Osmund�s New Legacy: The Scriptorium Informs Electronic Text.� � Libraries & Culture 36, no 4 (Fall 2001): 506-16.   ����������� The first half of the article told about St. Osmund and his church at Old Sarum. It explained how scriptoriums worked and what his role in it was. He was able to choose what books he wanted from other places to be brought back to his to be copied. In many cases he acquired rare books and manuscripts and used his scriptorium to distribute them. The copies his scribes made were rather poor, the text wasn�t aligned and they used uneven parchment, but they served their purpose. Today 50 books from his collection survive and they show what types of material St. Osmund chose to copy. From other copies that have survived, scholars can tell where his sources may have originated from and where his copies went to. ����������� The second half of the article was about how the process of choosing texts and copying them in the 11th century are like digitization today. In both cases someone has to make a choice as to what should be copied. In St. Osmund�s day there were a small number of texts for him to choose from but today there is much more. He chose his books to copy based on what he liked but today digitization is based on things like rarity and importance. In many cases today digitized copies, especially older ones, are poorly scanned and like the scriptorium copies they are not always easily readable. But the author points out that while the books copied at Old Sarum have survived nearly a thousand years, the quickly changing technology of the modern era makes if very doubtful that items digitized today will survive a fraction of that. ����������� The whole point of this article was to compare the process of copying text in an 11th Century scriptorium to that of digitizing documents today. While the article was well written and did provide lots of good information the actual comparison was never well made. The author did point out some similarities but it was never shown how the two processes were alike. Actually there were as many differences mentioned as there were similarities. At the beginning of the article it is stated that there are many things we can learn about digitization from the copying of texts at the scriptorium. It is never clearly pointed out what those things we can learn are. At times it sounds like the author has a negative view of digitization because so many problems are described with fewer benefits mentioned.