This post from a commentator on issues relating to the survival of
journalism in the digital age may be of interest as it shows that the
concerns of many people on this list are not confined to librarians
http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/05/30/the-search-world-is-flat/
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Laval Hunsucker
Sent: 30 May 2010 22:32
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Not sure what this means
Shawne Miksa wrote :
> I thought I was the only person with these worries.
No cause for concern. I suspect that there are very few
persons *without* these worries, in varying degrees of
frequency and intensity. It's just that it's so much easier
to suppress them, and even easier not to bring them up
in polite company as it were. But -- How appropriate
*are* they -- really ??
And a thought-exercise perhaps : If Mark is not
exaggerating about such "new possibilities fraught with
new dangers", how different would our work be if we
were genuinely to take those dangers deadly seriously ?
What should we be doing differently ??
- Laval Hunsucker
Breukelen, Nederland
----- Original Message ----
From: "Miksa, Shawne" <SMiksa_at_UNT.EDU>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Fri, May 28, 2010 9:26:24 PM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Not sure what this means
Mark--wow, thank you. I thought I was the only person with these
worries.
**************************************************************
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
**************************************************************
________________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU]
On Behalf Of Mark Vega [vegamf_at_UCI.EDU]
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2010 10:10 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Not sure what this means
While it may seem contradictory, as an IT specialist I look upon the
digital
age with both excitement and trepidation: new possibilities fraught with
new
dangers.
As humans become more and more dependent upon their new digital tools, I
worry that we will forget how to do the real work ourselves (how many
people
today can start a fire without a lighter? how many high schoolers can do
long division without a calculator?). I often think back upon one of
the
original Star Trek episodes in which the Enterprise crew came upon a
society
that had become so dependent upon the supercomputer that ran virtually
everything on their planet that, when it began to fail, they were not
only
at a loss as to how to fix it, but also as to how to take over the
life-sustaining tasks that it had been performing for them.
Like many speculative fiction writers I've read, I can also imagine a
day
when an EMP weapon (electro-magnetic pulse - they already exist, you
know)
could wipe out the entirety of a society's digital knowledge base and
throw
civilization back into the equivalent of the Stone Age. If you've ever
had
a hard drive failure, you are already aware how ephemeral digital data
can be.
I also have concerns about committing all of Man's accumulated knowledge
over to corporations. Is anyone out there really comfortable with
allowing
Google to become the sole arbiter and storehouse of this information?
Google may seem like a benign giant, but it is a for-profit (monetary
profit, that is) entity and it only takes one CEO with other than benign
intentions to change that. And does anyone really trust Bing (given
Microsoft's track record) to make their information decisions for them?
So I, both digital tool-maker and anachronism, while continuing to
contribute to the new age of information storage and retrieval and to
revel
in the possibilities, will also continue to hedge my bets and hoard my
own
personal physical library and look to my local library for unfettered,
uncorporatized access to information.
Or, to paraphrase Charlton Heston: You can have my books when you pry
them
from my cold, dead hands!
--
Mark Vega
Programmer/Analyst
University of California, Irvine Libraries
--
Received on Mon May 31 2010 - 09:30:24 EDT