Nathan Rinne wrote:
> I firmly believe that Google could never make something approximating a
> dependable, quality catalog without the records that libraries have
> worked so hard to make. Should libraries (and by extension OCLC) look
> forward to the day where they can just give everything away to Google...
> giving into the added powers that Google's alluring algorithms can
> provide? (after all, if they cease to be concerned about protecting
> their records, may that not, in effect, be what they are doing?)
While I agree with these sentiments completely, the problem is that I am not sure that the general public does and since our profession exists because the public (i.e. our users) decide to fund us, or not, their perceptions are vital, and especially so today. Before the web, libraries had an almost monopoly on information (or at least that was the way it seemed in the popular imagination) but now that we are facing real, and stiff, competition, problems have arisen that before were hidden, or at least, could be safely ignored.
For example, when I try to instruct students in how to search a catalog, they look at you like you are teaching them how to make a fire with two sticks, so you have to (at least I feel that I have to) interject phrases such as, "this is the way that it has traditionally been done" "both methods have their strengths" "someday some clever person will bring it all together and something really powerful will be made."
What I am saying is: I don't know if our users see the value in a "dependable, quality catalog" as librarians understand it. This is one of the major criticisms I have of RDA, which is rooted very firmly in the library world and not in their world. While to me it is elementary to suspect that if a tool can't even bring the separate volumes of a bookset together, we should then be very skeptical that it can bring an author's works together, or bring together a collection of resources on the same topic (that is "reliably" in a librarian's definition of the word). This turns out to be very difficult for a layman to grasp however.
This should be one of the major focuses of user education, so that our users can begin to appreciate some of the work that we do. That is *very difficult* to do however, when people are so "happy" with Google.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Fri Jul 10 2009 - 06:43:12 EDT