On Fri, 25 Feb 2011, Weinheimer Jim wrote:
> Library selection does not attempt to be neutral ... It actively attempts to
> include all types of different opinions and attitudes
These statements are contradictory.
> Now, what is "The Best"? ... There is only so much money and so
> much space.
Thus cutting library budgets is a political act having the effect of
limiting choice.
> When I say that somebody *must* make the decision, it is similar to a
> judge who must make a decision
Bad analogy. We all know (or should) that judges rule on property not
people, and how many lives have been ruined by corrupted judges.
> But then Carol goes on to ask, "what is garbage"? Of course, that
> depends on the collection. A pile of comic books may be useless in one
> collection but the main part of another.
Not exactly. What it says is that nothing is "garbage", and that
materials simply need to be efficiently located in appropriate
collections.
> There are lots of other people who have been hurt by the existence of
> materials that are not thrown away.
Exactly. A complete archive is absolutely necessary to interpret actions
and hold politicians accountable. One of the greatest failings of the
legal system is a superficial knowledge of evidence and the law itself,
begging for the development of open databases. We have to get away from
time-constraints on processing and create new ways of being more thorough.
This reiterates why I am arguing for replacing "selection" with new
responsibilities: interrelation of data and instruction in critical
thinking.
> ... people are always complaining that they are finding too much ...
Well, you don't' rationally solve that problem by providing less. Instead,
you develop better ways of processing information to permit more concisely
interrelated discovery. Usually, when a person finds "too much", that
person is actually having difficulty determining relevance, so instead of
teaching limitation, we can teach critical thinking to determine
relevance.
> In the past, this has not really been a problem for libraries, who have
> pretty much striven to add as much as they can, depending on space and
> budget.
All we've been doing is "adding." It's time we advanced intellectually a
bit and started "data processing."
> When somebody gets 8 million hits on Google, the "relevance" ranking is
> a type of selection made by a computer ... It is programmed ...
> corporation[s], using methods that are secret and that can be
> manipulated ... for whatever ... reasons they may have.
Exactly why we should be pushing for commercially neutral search
engines, and/or ways of circumventing prejudiced relevance ranking.
> We should not pretend that this relevance ranking is either
> "objective" or "neutral" ... I am not finding fault
We should all be willing to find fault in manipulated data and loudly
proclaiming so, in defense of "neutrality." We can't just be the willing
purveyors of distortion; we have a responsibility to demonstrate how to
push the fog aside for the sake of objectivity itself (and perhaps no one
else has monopolized that responsibility, or perhaps even recognized it).
> As a librarian, I happen to know that there is a lot of very good
> information that is not coming up in the top one or two screens in
> Google
THEN STOP USING THE WORD "GOOGLE" and start some comparative studies of
search engines for the purpose of making recommendations on how to reduce
the distorting effects of corporate management of data (and who says they
are not in some cases intentional?).
> I can only hope that traditional library ethics will be a major part of
> [change]
Me too-- from passive custodianship and economically-driven selection to
active education, defense of objectivity, and inter-library collaboration
in preserving data and interrelating it.
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."
Opinions belong exclusively to the individuals expressing them, but
sharing is permitted.
Received on Fri Feb 25 2011 - 17:23:59 EST