On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, Stephen Paling wrote:
> I feel comfortable saying that I'm past the idealism phase.
Good for you, personally, but the society that determines the direction
of the library world (it could be the other way around) is in the midst of
a significant conflict between idealism and immediate practicality,
between freedom of information and subjugation of information to economic
control.
> What specific recommendations do you have?
We tend to be too specific and miss the "big picture", that libraries
should collaboratively shift some local funding away from "gatekeeping" of
local resources to collaborating in the development of non-profit
completely open-source digital information access systems that complement
interlinked collections and the Internet rather than competing.
The library community is unique in its egalitarian responsibility (to
preserve and enhance open access to all data for the purpose of
facilitating knowledge development) and in its traditionally
non-commercial position in society. Google, for example, is not.
Any commercialization (competitive for-profit activity) of libraries or
library systems that operates proprietarily subverts the mission of
libaries.
"Show me the money", you might say. Well, show me the responsibility of
libraries to become active in effectuating egalitarian government *based
upon* [not just funding] library activities (data provision and knowledge
extraction). Our general passivity and provinciality is presently
inviable in competition with more aggressive interests.
> Just out of curiosity, what operating system and application suite(-s)
> do you use? Are they non-commercial?
We're in the mundane process of spending a lot of time and money trying
to make proprietary commercial ILSs, etc., work under a Red Hat Linux
general computing platform.
What makes it mundane is that it is a local process and that the library
community is still primarily interested in operating squeaky (proprietary)
"gates" rather than inventing them. Who better?
Cheers!
jgm
John G. Marr
Cataloger
CDS, UL
Univ. of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
jmarr_at_unm.edu
jmarr_at_flash.net
**There are only 2 kinds of thinking: "out of the box" and "outside
the box."
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Received on Tue Jun 29 2010 - 13:59:58 EDT