Alexander Johannesen wrote:
<snip>
> and are definitely not supplied by the Googles and Yahoos and
> Mendeleys out there, although they may desperately try to convince
> us that people need nothing else. We need them and they need us.
Prove it. With anything. Prove that anyone needs catalogers in any
meaningful or compelling way. Prove that they are relevant to what's
going on in the publishing and academic industries.
</snip>
How can I prove it?
How about this? Pretend that you are interested in the history of black people in agriculture in the United States. Tell me how you would go about searching and retrieving information in Google or Google Scholar or a related tool using full text. And I'm not even going to consider here the "quality" of the items, which is a related point.
We get questions like this every day.
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
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992
Received on Thu Apr 22 2010 - 07:18:30 EDT