Karen Coyle wrote:
> Eventually, we'll have free services that have enough of a track record
> to be trusted, but as we know, libraries work on a long time frame --
> not years, but at least decades.
This may be true, but I don't think that libraries can afford to wait decades (which in internet terms is eons). Already, and I'm not kidding, many of my students cannot even imagine what it was like to do any kind of research before Google (What? No copy and paste?! People had to *write things down*??!!!) For them, it's like people were living in the Stone Age running from mammoths and saber-tooth tigers.
So, maybe while libraries are waiting around for systems to trust, our users will have moved on long before and forgotten us completely. It's a quandry for libraries, I admit, but I don't think we can afford to ignore the vast majority of materials that our users are demanding today just because they don't fit into our usual framework.
Many of these resources disappear, as you say, but this is where we could work closely with the Internet Archive, which has an immense number of sites stored. If something isn't being archived, we could probably get it on a fast track somehow. If that's not suitable, perhaps we could actually build something ourselves?
The main thing is: we need to show that we are relevant today.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Wed Oct 01 2008 - 01:19:59 EDT