On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 22:39, Emerita Cuesta <ecuesta_at_law.miami.edu> wrote:
> Hello all. First time poster, long time lurker in this listserv.
Welcome to the slaughterhouse. :)
I notice that a lot of posts lately are quite old. Is something up
with the listserv?
> The first thing that seems to be forgotten in these discussions is time.
Not sure its forgotten. Remember, a lot of us are crying wolf! because
we're running out of it, and perhaps urging people to spend their time
focusing on saving the Titatic before the ice berg hits. If it hits,
of course. And if its name is indeed Titanic.
> The second thing is, what is this all for? Talking about
> cloud computing, clustering, digital identity management,
> or data modeling is all fantastic, but how would they
> benefit library users?
Ah, my favorite subject. The simple answer is; to find what they want.
If your answer to this is "a librarian can help you just as well",
then you're ignoring the amount of people wanting info and the amount
of info available. If your answer is "Google can do the simple stuff,
the librarian can do the hard stuff", then you're ignoring all what's
said above, plus that people more and more go online to find stuff. If
you ain't got it straight away, they'll look somewhere else. And if
your answer is "Google can't find it", then you've just pointed out
that the library hasn't shared their data, no one points to the
library as a place to find stuff, and we're back to square one.
All of this technology talk is here because we're now in the digital
information age, and I think that the library world should be a part
of it instead of just observing it.
> What serves our patrons best today and next month and a year from now?
That's a really good question. When I write here, I always think 10-20
years ahead. Right now people and the library world are fine. But
things are changing. Stuff gets digitized. E-books emerge, as well as
technology that makes all that digital content theirs, wirelessly and
at their fingertips, with search built-in. This is not SciFi, but
right at our doorstep. So do you invite it in, or shrug it off as some
madman selling hair-cures?
> The users coming up to the reference desk or the catalog
> station or logging in remotely want help in the here and
> now and it's our responsibility to provide it.
How many people can you handle at one time?
> Becoming experts in every new technology and riding it until
> the next best thing comes along and then moving on to that
> seems to me to be counterproductive.
Not sure anyone has suggested you become experts in every thing that
comes along. In fact, from the list you quote nothing is new; all of
it with at least 10 years behind it. And it wouldn't hurt to become
experts in something the library world would benefit from.
> but picking which new technologies will have long-term implications
> and which are short-term shiny new toys and convincing institutions
> to invest in them is... I don't even think "complicated" of "difficult"
> are the right words.
Of course its hard. Then, the alternative is to sit still and hope no
one notices ... :)
> It seems to me that there are two kinds of librarianship being created by
> technology: a theoretical one dealing with technical developments in
> the creation and management of information, and a practical one dealing
> with providing such information to the user.
Possibly, but I think you already have this. May I suggest they merge
a little, and a little faster? Thanks. :)
Kind regards,
Alex
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Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Mon Sep 29 2008 - 15:39:44 EDT