Rinne, Nathan wrote:
> Given Google's influence, people and infrastructural resources, and
> head-start (regarding scanning books, including out-of-print books
> currently subject to copyright law***), how would the result not end up
> being a de-facto monopoly (leaving everyone else in the dust?)
>
> More and more I think such a thought may be reasonable: "Help me OCLC,
> you're my only hope..." (to contrast with Tim Spalding's "OCLC as
> Death
> Star" comparison: "I find your lack of faith disturbing") : )
There is an excellent example out there for libraries to follow, and that is the open source community. I still do not understand the business model of open source and it is still very new for non-systems people, but the example of the success of Linux is just incredible. The open source community is getting stronger and stronger. Microsoft Explorer is nowhere near as good as Firefox, OpenOffice is much better than Microsoft Office. There are Moodle and Sakai instead of Blackboard. There are many examples of open development out there, and these open products can do very well.
It doesn't mean that you can't make money off of these open products. For example, Liblime hosts Koha catalogs. And don't forget about Google itself. It was barely heard of only a dozen years ago and now it's considered a powerhouse... by giving things away!!
My own hope is that once we get away from the idea of our own, tiny, small collections and begin to realize that our "collections" have changed to include the many wonderful things on the web--and then we get serious about getting control of these items somehow, plus, we finally dump our card catalogs and create discovery tools that our patrons actually like and enjoy using (!!!!) then our traditional methods of organizing and providing coherent, reliable access to materials may actually become to be understood and valued very highly.
The most interesting attempts in some of these areas are by the "small fry" since you don't need incredible money to develop new tools today (thanks to the open source movement). Librarians need imagination fed by their knowledge and experience to build innovative tools that people want.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Jul 14 2009 - 12:06:42 EDT