Alexander Johannesen wrote:
>> ...there's the rub: Libraries have always been about
>> providing free and liberal and uncensored access to information for
>> everybody.
>
> No, that's not the rub, not in this new brave world. In the past the
> rub was that information and access was *hard*. With the digital
> realm, access and information is *easy*. The hard part is making sense
> of the sheer amount of stuff, how to gleam gold from all that silt,
> but this last part isn't something the library world has worked hard
> at (for, mostly, historical reasons, of course).
>
This is not a response to what I was actually saying, but anyway:
Is it the library's job to make understanding information easy, and
for everybody?? And even if it is, this is not the topic of this
present discussion. Also, what's gold for one fellow is silt for the
next. Our competence and capacity for judgement has its limits.
> Think of how many generations removed
> from when all academic information, apart from historical reference,
> are integrated into a network, think of the value the library has in
> such an environment. I'd say ; zero.
No disagreement. To get there, libraries will still have to make a
contribution. Without them, a GBS now search would bring up nothing
more often than something. With them, and with their catalog data, via
WorldCat the GBS may still lead to something in a library not too far
away. Whether the reader wants to know what a catalog is or not.
That situation may certainly be a transitional one, and even if a lot
of evidence is pointing that way, predictions are still hard.
B.Eversberg
Received on Tue Mar 30 2010 - 05:13:07 EDT