Weinheimer Jim wrote:
>
> When Google Books is approved eventually, how will anybody "select" from that? You either get it or you won't It's just like "selection" of journals has gone out of the control of librarians once the aggregators came around; with Google Books, the same thing will happen. I won't be able to "select" or "deselect" anything at all. I can only provide access.
>
In theory, you could provide a searchable catalog of a _subset_ of
Google books. That would then point to the book in Google books. Now,
whether this will be of enough benefit to users to justify the time it
would take to do... another question. But it's possible.
We've definitely outsourced a lot of our traditional work to vendors --
who may or may not be doing a very good job at it. We've currently left
ourselves, by our own work, without much of a role. This is our own
fault. The solution is not neccesarily taking back exactly what we used
to do. The solution, as Jim alludes to, is figuring out what our users
_need_, and then (re)claiming the work necessary to meet those needs.
There will always be things that our users need that the 'vendors' are
not meeting. If the 'vendor' world is increasingly meeting the needs
that we used to -- that just frees us up to meet ever more sophisticated
needs. We've just got to figure out what they are, and get on the ball
-- and stop thinking that if we just pay someone else enough money, we
don't need to _think_ ourselves, we don't need any professional
expertise. That's an underlying kind of thinking I sense often from
libraries and librarians. Pay a vendor enough money, problem solved,
the end. Not so.
Received on Wed Sep 09 2009 - 10:21:01 EDT