I have done some thinking about your findings that a small percentage of the German books were available in Google Books. It seems that there are two completely different conclusions one could draw from this:
a) physical libraries need to be nurtured, protected, and expanded;
b) it's a national emergency that cannot be tolerated and must be fixed as soon as possible.
It all depends on how people continue to understand "access." Will it mean simple availability to the text after traveling to a library and/or waiting for ILL? Or, will the "laziness factor" become just too strong and the traditional idea of libraries as a place to go for information and knowledge simply becomes an intolerable hindrance?
My own guess is that once the Google Books agreement is implemented in the English-speaking countries, we will hear glowing testimonies of all the resources they would never have been aware of before, because of the power of "modern searching" and the new possibilities of working with texts that were unknown before. Different nations will react in different ways, but most probably will react with option b), although I would guess some may react with option a). My own opinion is that not having immediate, online access to library materials will be seen as a serious defect that must be corrected. Google's incredible example has shown that scanning massive numbers of books can be done in just a few years, and relatively cheaply. Hundreds of millions of dollars doesn't sound so bad today after these incredible bailouts and the huge personal fortunes of some of the world's richest people. To put it in perspective, the price of a single B-2 Bomber is between one and two billion do!
llars!
As I wrote in my previous, poorly-written posting (sorry about that. I clarified it on my blog. That's why I entitled it "First Thus"!) the essence of the catalog was always based on *inclusion*--that adding a resource meant that I was giving it access to the world, and otherwise this resource would have been ignored. In the new world, I think the catalog must follow a completely different idea of *exclusion*--that is, people will go to it for well-selected, worthwhile materials. In other words, for a "seal of approval"
I realize that this would have huge consequences for librarianship as a whole and the very nature of the catalog, but it would provide a service that people really want, and it would distinguish us from "being an inferior subset of Google Books" which I think will be inevitable if we do not change our focus.
And oh yes! We should keep cataloging, and doing it better than we are now! (I have been doing some cataloging lately, and the quality leaves a lot to be desired. If we expect people to want our metadata, it had better be pretty good!)
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Bernhard Eversberg
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 8:57 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Next next generation catalogs, some reality check
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 - 03:55:37 EDT