Alexander Johannesen wrote:
>
> ... If Google is sub-par then libraries can strive to be good
> enough to be noticed and to be take seriously in this field. However,
> I still think it's only a matter of a very short time before the tides
> in this debacle will change again; don't think for a second that once
> this deal goes through that it will be the last. The digital market is
> exploding these days ...
Yes, the market. But there's the rub: Libraries have always been about
providing free and liberal and uncensored access to information for
everybody.
If the digital market is exploding and will blast paper away, then what?
If they stop printing on paper and making books, if all access to
content is turned into merchandise, then what we do with our catalogs is
not the big issue, the bigger one is that libraries can no longer
fulfil what used to be their mission.
Those books the google deal will make available will not be free,
access will not be liberal, and whether or not there might be
censorship (blocking of access, removal of files) will be difficult to
find out.
In a market economy, access to information can of course not be
completely free - someone's got to pay even for the books libraries
put on their shelves and the licenses they obtain from producers.
So it ultimately depends on taxpayers if they want the market to
manage *all* access to information, for everybody. If eventually it
turns out the market can do a better job to everybody's satisfaction,
then of course there's no longer a point in having libraries. Right now,
it is an open question if and when that will come about. If it does,
the library mission will be put to rest.
Paper isn't perfect, we all know it. Books are a nightmare to deal with
when you have millions. Libraries/ians are doomed if they cling to
books. They aren't doing that, though, they are integrating their
collections into the digital world already, and a huge part of
those collections is currently not digitized anywhere and of course they
have nowhere near the resources to do it. "Liberate the bound volumes!"
was a slogan in the 90s, but that's only a first step. What needs to be
done is liberating their content from its confines, in a much bigger way
than has been possible with catalog records, FRBRed or not.
Readers do not dream of better catalogs, what they might envision (did
they think about it) is a question answering machine, and of course they
default to Google in their search for it. And they do not dream of
better libraries but of a memory extension that is as easy to tap into
as the one inside one's own skull. But whether that proves technically
impossible or not, maybe Plato was right when he warned of recorded
knowledge as making a man's thinking depend on artifacts outside their
own mental capacities. Writing and book production was wrong from the
beginning...
For the time being, it may still be less than bad to do some good
cataloging.
B.Eversberg
Received on Tue Mar 30 2010 - 03:04:42 EDT