James Weinheimer wrote:
> This is the climate why I believe librarians must sit down and
> deeply reconsider what it is that they are *really* doing,... I
> think the business that libraries are really in is: facilitating
> scholarly communication.
I, myself, would go a bit further. I libraries are about making data
and information useful to their clientele. Facilitating scholarly
communication is just one type of usefulness.
Yes, I believe libraries need to continue to do the processes of
collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination, but these
are not the ends but rather the means. We do these things because they
enable us to provide services against content. These processes enable
us to put collections into context. They make it easier for our
constituents to do the work they need to do, whether that be learning,
teaching, research, decision-making, planning, justification,
entertainment, self-fulfillment, etc.
All libraries are a part of larger organizations. School libraries are
a part of schools. Academic libraries are a part of colleges and
universities. Special libraries are a part of businesses and
governments. Public libraries are a member of municipalities. Because
we work for these larger organizations we are expected to know and
understand the "information needs" of these groups. We are expected to
know them better than the Googles of the world. With this knowledge we
collect certain things and not others. Moreover, we are expected to
provide not only guidance in their use but the tools to do the work.
We ought to be able to put these things into the context of our users
easier than an outsourced institution. This is our niche. Whether it
be facilitating scholarly communication, manipulating data sets,
comparing & contrasting the use of colloquial terms in literature, or
simply understanding the central thesis to a scientific article, all
are possibilities for libraries.
So what if Google's metadata describing books is not 100 percent
accurate. Their indexing technologies will make the discovery of
"their" content good enough. Their goal is to attract a lot of
attention in order to generate revenue. Full text books are a great
way to do that because the totality of books (more or less) reflect
the totality of humanity. Google has (more or less) solved the
discovery problem. It is time to move on to the more challenging
aspects of library service -- putting the information to use.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Wed Sep 09 2009 - 08:12:28 EDT