Jonathan, Corey, Michael, and everybody,
I appreciate your feedback. I will look at those slide shows and
presentations Ross sent.
Jonathan, maybe you're right that finding full text faster is important.
I don't know. I do think that computers have been a factor in our lives,
along with cars, contributing to our being less patient. I know I get
irritated if my computer takes a few extra seconds to boot up or shut
down, or if some operation on OCLC Connexion takes slightly longer than
usual. Computers give us an expectation of getting things quickly, with
a few clicks or keystrokes. Maybe that's just "the world we live in,"
and of course if there's an easy way to fix things that slow us down, we
should do it. As I said, I'm not an electronic or media cataloger, so I
don't know why it hasn't been done in a lot of cases. But I doubt that
the actual quality or quantity of work I have completed has ever been
very impacted by such tiny delays.
Burke wrote:
"I'm to the point where I think we'd be better off to just utterly erase
our existing academic catalogs and forget about backwards-compatibility,
lock all the vendors and librarians and scholars together in a room, and
make them hammer out electronic research tools that are Amazon-plus,
Amazon without the intent to sell books but with the intent of guiding
users of all kinds to the books and articles and materials that they
ought to find, a catalog that is a partner rather than an obstacle in
the making and tracking of knowledge."
That raises a lot of questions. First, who pays for all those vendors,
librarians, and scholars coming together in a room? Especially when you
consider that our present catalogs are basically paid for. Amazon was
able to build its system because they did "intend to sell books" and had
good reason to think they'd be able to. So Burke's proposal (if it can
be taken seriously as one) seems economically impossible. He just seems
to like Amazon and think that, with a stroke of magic, a better academic
information interface can be created from it.
Mark Andrews wrote:
"The kind of feedback Burke provides is PRICELESS and should be
cultivated, encouraged, and incorporated into our thinking, planning and
acting. Remember, people don't have libraries and librarians because
they NEED them. They have libraries and librarians because they WANT
them. When the "want" stops we go away. What's true for our vendors
is, I'm afraid, also true of us."
Well, they both need them and want them. They may not think they want
them for awhile and then realize they need them. I just talked to a
coworker yesterday about a small medical library she worked in. Her
former boss has been advised to get rid of their old card catalog,
because card catalogs are passé. But my coworker worries that that is
actually the only permanent record they have of their resources. They
have an in-house electronic system that is questionable for its
reliability, maintained by a couple of technicians who could leave any
day, and she worries that if they did or lost interest in maintaining
it, the electronic data could be lost. I agreed with her that it's
better to err on the side of caution. So I think "need" somewhat takes
precedence over "want." "Want" is pretty ephemeral, and "need" is deeper
and longer lasting.
--Ted Gemberling
Received on Thu May 31 2007 - 12:10:15 EDT