Weinheimer Jim :
>
> And I keep pointing out: what will happen when the Google-Publisher
> agreement is eventually approved?
Yes, that's going to be a turning point of sorts, a great boost for the
laziness attitude. I'd rather not speak of laziness here, but I think it
is a fundamental behavioral law that the fastest, easiest, most
effective method or way is chosen to reach a given goal or deal with
a situation. And then, when some success has been experienced, the
same method will be tried again in new situations and preferred over
others, thus missing better options that are available. Over time,
wrong choices of method can get corrected, but here's also the danger
of running into dead ends. Some species get extinct because for too
long they relied on suboptimal strategies that had once been successful
but eventually failed.
Applied to libraries and their patrons, that can mean:
1. Librarians should seek new strategies that turn their skills into
"products" which meet demands. The physical collections can no longer
be the primary product.
2. Patrons - who will of course not listen to us - will always have a
better chance of "survival" if they keep an open mind to new and
different strategies of behavior.
And of course, students don't flock to libraries these days because
of the large old collections, we are aware of that (saw one fellow
in the Berlin library who was watching a film on his screen). They
use it as a convenient place for all sorts of activities but obviously
also for doing some work that requires information. And as long as they
come in large numbers, there's the chance for situations in which
they experience the library as not just a convenient place for
whatever they intend to do there. This chance of encounters with
libraries and librarians is much smaller if they do their stuff
elsewhere on their own PCs, and it is our chance as much as theirs.
But for us it all depends on what *we* do there, not what they do.
Back to that Google agreement, what I see as crucial in the turning
point ahead is that a critical mass is created which, together with
everything else that is already available online will eat up all
the time anyone has left, and visits to the library will appear
way too time-consuming to consider. In that scenario, libraries
can only lose if their strategy doen't involve attractive and growing
digital collections and services.
B.Eversberg
Received on Fri Mar 26 2010 - 06:33:25 EDT