Roberta Astroff

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is Elizabeth Eisenstein's monumental history of the advent of printing and its relation to scholarship and knowledge. A foundational text of my doctoral education, it was a revelation of the sorts of questions that could and should be asked about culture and technology. Even though I am not a historian, the book served as a paradigm when I did research into newer technologies and contemporary cultures. Now that I am a librarian, the book again provides me with a model for my exploration of the new media through which knowledge is represented, produced, circulated and applied.