From: "Pakala, Jim" <Jim.Pakala_at_covenantseminary.edu>
The attached (pdf) I've also provided the text of, below (but I changed the
font to Times New Roman). It puts the lie to "Why do we need to store books
if everything is going digital?" My own perception is that "both/and" will
characterize the future much more than "either/or" will, and for diverse
reasons.
James C. Pakala
<<mailto:jim.pakala_at_covenantseminary.edu>mailto:jim.pakala_at_covenantseminary.edu>
Library Director Phone: 314-434-4044 ext.4101;
Fax: 314-434-4819
Covenant Theological Seminary
12330 Conway Road; St. Louis, MO 63141-8697
=======================================================================
Original posting below:
From: Emily Stambaugh <stambae_at_wfu.edu>
Can you point me to some supporting literature, anecdotes or statements you
have used to make your case when asked this question by a non-librarian?
"Why do we need to store books if everything is going digital?"
I can rattle off plenty of reasons why and have quite a few books and
articles, but I'd like to get your ideas as well.
Thank you.
Emily Stambaugh
Collection Development Librarian
Z. Smith Reynolds Library
Wake Forest University
PO Box 7777 Reynolda Station
Winston-Salem, NC 27109 USA
Tel. (336) 758-6136
Fax (336) 758-4652
stambae_at_wfu.edu
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Los Angeles Times: Google
and God's Mind
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-nugorman17d...
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
1 of 2 12/17/2004 2:07 PM
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-nugorman17dec17,1,7568022.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
COMMENTARY
Google and God's Mind
The problem is, information isn't knowledge.
By Michael Gorman
Michael Gorman is dean of library services at Cal State Fresno and
president-elect of the American Library Assn.
December 17, 2004
The boogie-woogie Google boys, it appears, dream of taking
over the universe by gathering all the "information" in the world and
creating the electronic equivalent of, in their own modest words, "the mind
of God." If you are taken in by all the fanfare and hoopla that have
attended their project to digitize all the books in a number of major
libraries (including the University of Michigan and New York Public), you
would think they are well on their way to godliness.
I do not share that opinion. The books in
great libraries are much more than the sum of their parts. They are
designed to be read sequentially and cumulatively, so that the reader gains
knowledge in the reading.
A good scholarly book on, say, prisons in 19th century
France goes well beyond simply supplying facts. Just imagine that book
digitized and available for Googling. Google isn't saying exactly how such
a search would work, but if it's anything like the current system, you
might enter, say, "Nantes+Prisons" and get back hundreds of thousands of
"hits." Somewhere in those hundreds of thousands would be a reference to a
paragraph or more in our book. If you found it, what would you do with it?
Supposing it says " … there were few murderers in the prisons of Nantes in
1874 … " and gives you the source of the paragraph. That is all but
useless. Absent a lot more searching, you have no idea whether there are
other references to the subject in the book, and the "information" you have
found is almost meaningless out of context.
So, you abandon that line of inquiry or resolve to read
the book. Are you going to do that online, assuming it's out of copyright?
(In the Google scheme, hundreds of thousands of books in copyright will not
be available to be read as a whole.) Not many would choose to stare at a
screen long enough to do that.
Are you going to print the book, and end up with 500
unbound sheets? Or will you request the actual book (in copyright or out)
through the active and developed interlibrary lending system that supplies
thousands of books daily to scholars, researchers and dilettantes
worldwide? The latter involves a short wait, of course. We all know that,
in Googleworld, speed is of the essence, but it is not to most scholarly
research in the real world.
The nub of the matter lies in the distinction between
information (data, facts, images, quotes and brief texts that can be used
out of context) and recorded knowledge (the cumulative exposition found in
scholarly and literary texts and in popular nonfiction). When it comes to
information, a snippet from Page 142 might be useful. When it comes to
recorded knowledge, a snippet from Page 142 must be understood in the light
of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in
the first place.
I am all in favor of digitizing books that concentrate on
delivering information, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias and gazetteers,
as opposed to knowledge. I also favor digitizing such library holdings as
unique manuscript collections, or photographs, when seeing the object
itself is the point (this is reportedly the deal the New York Public
Library has made with Google). I believe, however, that massive databases
of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive
exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first
time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and
obliterate all previous forms.
It is beyond premature to prepare to mourn the death of
libraries and the death of the book. If I had shares in publishing
companies I would hang on to them. This latest version of Google hype will
no doubt join taking personal commuter helicopters to work and carrying the
Library of Congress in a briefcase on microfilm as "back to the future"
failures, for the simple reason that they were solutions in search of a
problem.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.
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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
Received on Tue Feb 08 2005 - 03:24:12 EST