Did the set of volumes belong to a library or was this from someone's private collection? My point being that if they were not part of a library collection then finding them online via Google Books is a good thing. I will continue to maintain that library catalogs exist primarily for the library collection, not for the entire universe of resourses, online or not. It can be a portal to resources outside the primary collection, but that does not make it equivalent to a search engine. Please, dear god, make the comparisons go away.
If just one person needs to use the library to do research then the library is serving its purpose. The question of a library's existence, and with that its library catalog, should not depend on how many people use it and how often. (I know--totally unrealistic, but I say it nonetheless.) I love being able to Google something, to access the latest research articles, etc. But, when I need to do some hardcore research I love being able to go to the stacks or request things from remote storage. I discover so many things that I would never discover online. The existence of instant access to digitized resources should not mean the end of our more traditional (but evolving) methods of access to non-digitized resources.
I agree that we've made it so no one seems to even know we exist. Isn't that sort of a good thing? Sort of like the excellent waitperson who is there when needed but nearly invisible when not.
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Shawne D. Miksa, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Library and Information Sciences
College of Information
University of North Texas
email: Shawne.Miksa_at_unt.edu
http://courses.unt.edu/smiksa/index.htm
office 940-565-3560 fax 940-565-3101
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Received on Thu May 27 2010 - 16:36:08 EDT