> And interestingly, most of the articles about
> WHY we still need libraries are written by
> librarians, not by politicians or patrons.
That's quite interesting in itself, Bernie . Nonetheless, I
have long believed and still believe that it's useful to make
a couple of crucial distinctions in such questions. ( Which
I incidentally, in disagreement with Alex, don't perceive
as being "discussed to death" or feel to be "boring". )
Perhaps we ( I included ) are often too careless in our
discourse, neglecting to observe such distinctions in our
mental and communicative activities.
The first distinction is one between the phenomenon
libraries ( along with the materials and cultural memory
they preserve and render identifiable and accessible,
physically or electronically ) on the one hand, and the
phenomenon librarians -- or perhaps we should rather
say the "profession" of librarianship -- on the other.
The second distinction is one between librarians -- or,
if you will, library staff, or "librarianship", leaving aside
whether or not it qualifies as an actual profession -- as
assurers of that above-mentioned preservation and
identifiability and accessibility on the one hand, and on
the other hand, the librarian as a ( uniquely ) "skilled"
broker intervening discretionarily and directly between the
library "customer" and the materials she or he at any given
moment identifies and uses as sources of enlightenment,
insight, stimulation, inspiration, understanding, referral, or
amusement ( or any combination of the above ).
Why do I point up those distinctions in this thread -- and
in fact label them as crucial ? Well, yesterday Bernhard, in
support of his plea for making "it more obvious what the
benefit of having libraries and their services is", used as an
example the new Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm Zentrum in
Berlin, which "was an instant hit", whose "immense
'reading room' is full even on Sundays with its hundreds
of computerized desks". Sure -- this is a scenario I recognize
immediately ; you could say more or less the same thing
about the new central public library in Amsterdam that
opened its doors not all that long ago. Tremendous success.
Here we're talking about the *library as place* -- and what's
fashionable to call the library as "third place" nowadays.
Is that something that's important ? -- Yes. Is that a great
good ? -- Sure. Is that something that's self-legitimizing ?
-- I'll buy that. Is that something that's still needed in this
day and age ? -- I'd say so. Is that something destined to die
out ? -- I think and hope not. That's what I'd say about the
library as place, and I'd say the same thing ( collectively )
about the library as instrument of insured access to our
cultural/scholarly/scientific memory. If the institute that
we call library is in any danger, then there's something very
wrong, and I'll be the first to heed a call to arms ; I'd be in
favor of, as Jim put it, "putting up the very best fight we
possibly can". I doubt that anyone here, and surmise that
very few thoughtful persons anywhere else, would think
otherwise.
An obvious corollary is that the personnel necessary and
employed to allow the library to fulfill responsibly those
two functions deserves the same manner of description :
important, a great good, still needed in this day and age,
not destined to die out ( though obviously not, at least in
the same degree, self-legitimizing ). Jim was concerned
with the imperative "that people realize that they do need
us", and assumed therefore that "we will have to market
ourselves somehow" to that end. I'd say : don't worry,
forget that marketing ; the people don't have to be
enlightened or convinced that they need *this* kind of
librarian. We've been doing a great job for a long time,
and that hasn't gone unnoticed. There's evidence all over
the place ; we can point it out, but there's little need to
go searching for any more.
So much for the library and the librarian as guarantors of
the preservation, identifiability and accessibility of our
cultural and scholarly and scientific memory. What's left
is the librarian as ( uniquely ) "skilled" broker, as I put it
above. And *that*'s where the problem comes in. And
the problem is of a classic sort -- two irreconcilable ( or,
in Feyerabendian terminology, incommensurable )
perspectives. ( Ours and theirs -- and Jim and I agree on
whose counts more at the end of the day. )
Worse still, librarianship has come, in the last fifty years
or so, to stake its professional honor, and a large part of
its professional identity and self-respect, precisely on the
validity of this second presumed essential functional
aspect of the librarian qua librarian. That's the one shoe.
The other shoe is : people aren't buying it ; people never
have bought it ; and people are never going to by it.
Philosophically and pragmatically speaking. And, there's
gonna come a time -- as a matter of fact, it's already
begun -- when they're not gonna buy it, either, budgetarily
speaking. Curtain.
I don't believe I'm just running off at the mouth here, if
you don't mind my saying so. The writing has been on the
wall for a long time now. Since at least the early 1970s,
we've been consistently presented ( that is, those of us
who have followed the professional literature ) with
research results which
almost invariably show that when
users are asked to rank the
approaches to locating the
documentary information or references they require, in
descending order of those they prefer or trust the most,
the option that occupies the lowest place ( or very near to
it -- I've even seen it ranked in the eleventh position, and
after things like "asking a
family member" or "consulting
a friend" ) is, you guessed it,
"asking a librarian".
OK, that's evidence, and a lot of it, from many contexts
and at least three different countries, from my recollection.
And it jives pretty well with the increasingly demonstrable
preference for disintermediation in other areas of life. So
it's pretty clear that our actual and potential "patrons" out
there, or at least the immense majority of them, don't
*want* and don't feel the need for our help, for our
intervention, for our intermediation.
Next question : are they in fact essentially screwing
themselves ? As has numerous times been implied here.
Now, I've no reason to believe that *they* perceive things
that way. And I've never seen a librarian who did the work
and collected and analyzed the data to produce valid and
reliable results proving or even justifying the inference that
they are really, consciously or unconsciously, screwing
themselves. I've never even seen a librarian seriously
attempt to produce this kind of evidence.
Then it seems to me that it's not all that chic for us to
carry on protesting ( even among ourselves ) that the
outside world is just too dense to understand how needed
we are, lamenting how undervalued and underused our
"skills" are, and insisting on how incontrovertible *our*
take on ( and how self-evident our reification of ! )
"information" is. Not chic -- or productive -- either to
talk about how "lazy" people are, not to mention
fantasizing on such a basis, as was done here, about an
immanent "extinction of a species". Why don't we just
stop right now ? All this protesting and lamentation and
wringing of hands, even impugning, is not going to get
anybody anywhere -- not, anyway, until we ourselves are
sufficiently non-lazy to go out and produce some
convincing evidence to back up the hypothesis that those
skills that only *we* can bring to bear are verily *needed*.
And when I say convincing, I don't so much mean
convincing to us, or even convincing to any objective
third party, I mean convincing to our potential beneficiaries.
And when I say needed, I don't mean theoretically needed,
I mean *pragmatically*, demonstrably needed.
If I've missed something important, and such evidence
indeed exists, please accept my excuses, and do be so kind
as to help me out of my state of ignorance. I'd even be happy
to note any anecdotal 'evidence' anyone may have to offer.
Sorry for carrying on so long, folks. I know this is not
explicitly all that pertinent to next-generation cataloguing as
such, but it's not all that irrelevant either, perhaps.
- Laval Hunsucker
Breukelen, Nederland
----- Original Message ----
From: B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2_at_YAHOO.COM>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Fri, March 26, 2010 6:20:25 PM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Observations of a Librarian on Ebook Readers
Alexander Johannesen said:
"...by that rate you'll all be obsolete at the time politicians and patrons start questioning why we still build libraries and employ librarians."
Got news for you...that's already happening. School librarians are being laid off all over the country. School libraries are being converted to computer centers. Major public library systems are closing branches left and right (think Boston, LA, Charlotte NC, etc.).
When Google first started scanning books I set up a Google news alert for the terms "Google" and "libraries" so I could keep tabs on the project. Lately I've been getting a fair number of matches for articles, editorials, letters to the editor, etc., with the general theme of "if we have google, why do we need libraries". And interestingly, most of the articles about WHY we still need libraries are written by librarians, not by politicians or patrons.
Bernie Sloan
--- On Fri, 3/26/10, Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen_at_GMAIL.COM> wrote:
From: Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen_at_GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Observations of a Librarian on Ebook Readers
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Date: Friday, March 26, 2010, 6:55 AM
Hiya,
Look, um, I know that this subject has been discussed to death, and
I'm sure I'm not adding anything to the discussion really as it's
getting old and boring, but again I must point out ;
Unless you become kick-ass technologists, you will die out.
Now, that's not meant as a threat of any kind, it's just pointing out
the rather obvious fact that what traditionally has been called a
bibliographic world is, in fact, an information world, and that it is
moving towards a digital format at a tremendous speed, much faster
than what anyone could have predicted (well, there were always
someone, but who would believe those crazies, right?). And if *you*
guys don't take the role of kick-ass technologists of digital and
online content, someone else will. And again, Google is just a very
good example of that kind of someone. And I need not point out that
they're doing very well without any knowledge or use of traditional
meta data as you know it.
But being a technologist doesn't mean you have to be a programmer or
developer or project manager of sorts. It simply means that you know,
understand and use the latest technologies as part of your services.
It means that if you normally flip through paper and make records of
such, you need to - right now! - work out what a digital version of
your job is, and how that can be a better service to digital seekers.
Being "web 2.0" is not enough. Being savvy with HTML5 is not enough.
Putting up a Wiki is not enough. Making sites look good is not enough.
Heck, being traditional librarians in a digital space is counter to
the point ; the physical books (and CD's and DVD's and microfilms and
maps and pictures and sound and whatever else there is) *will* become
curiosa and items in storage, an archive of stuff only interesting to
special people. The information within them will get out into digital
form, probably faster than you can come to terms with that fact, and
by that rate you'll all be obsolete at the time politicians and
patrons start questioning why we still build libraries and employ
librarians.
You need to just jump in, bite hard and do kick-ass development. You
need to invent stuff. You need to come up with amazing ideas. You need
to merge the values you've already got with all that which is going on
in the digital, open and online space. Hold seminars about stuff, and
stream it live. Develop a new way digital photo extraction from
microfilm. Digitize more at a tremendous pace! (And pardon me for
saying this, but screw integration with stuff like Flickr, Facebook,
MySpace, YouTube and all that ... that's all nice, but it's not going
to make you relevant to what is coming) The best way to predict the
future, is to create it. The world is going online and digital, and
unless you kick ass in this space, you're not creating it, just riding
the way, on par with thousands of other opportunists out there who
probably can do a better job than you.
"But we don't have the money or the resources to do this."
Well, then I guess you're screwed.
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
--- http://shelter.nu/blog/ ----------------------------------------------
------------------ http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen ---
Received on Sat Mar 27 2010 - 14:48:54 EDT