Bryan Campbell wrote:
> And yet, I have answered plenty of these types of questions as a volunteer
> for the Internet Public Library (IPL) this semester. And they come from
> everywhere in the world.
>
> Bryan
> >
> >In sum, the web has obsoleted *some* of the uses of the library
> >already. Once upon a time people did need the library?or a decent
> >personal library?to answer trivial factual questions. That time is
> >gone. But I'm not convinced Wolfram Alpha, or any similar technology,
> >will shrink the library's domain much further.
> >
> >Tim
Yes, and I still have to get papers from JSTOR because some of my users never have gotten the hang of it. And these aren't just the old faculty, but undergraduates as well. We will always have people who are more or less helpless in the information environment, and whether they are helpless because they really are helpless and cannot learn, or whether it is because they are too lazy to do it themselves, I don't know.
I don't think it's wise to base ourselves on the most helpless of our users however. Of course, we need to continue to help them, but we should focus our efforts toward making them less dependent on us, and on other "information providers" who may not follow anything like our code of ethics.
On the other hand, I think it is very important that we fit into the newly emerging apparatus of scholarly communication somehow. "Scholarly" should be interpreted here very broadly, not necessarily only higher-level faculty, but also with undergraduates, high school and elementary school, but educational-related. I don't have enough experience to determine how this could work with public libraries, but there may be some possibilities there too. These networks are being built in all sorts of ways as we speak. Of course, the biggest example is http://arxiv.org/, which bypasses almost all the traditional publication/library paths, but there are others such as SSRN, H-Net and others.
With the economic meltdown, I think it's a fair assumption that more of these types of resources will be built in the future. How can libraries make their presence useful and wanted in these environments? Can they? In this scenario, what role does the library catalog play?
I think libraries can play a role, and by using the catalog in innovative ways. But how? I've been doing quite a bit of thinking lately in these directions.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Mon May 04 2009 - 13:44:23 EDT