Welcome to Ipl2, aka the Internet Public Library--useful but hardly a
national digital library system and probably not on the cusp of
evolving into one unless a group like COSLA takes a strong interest.
The Clinton-style slogan? "Information you can trust."
http://www.ipl.org. - David
David Rothman,
Cofounder, LibraryCity.org
703-370-6540
On 5/24/11, James Weinheimer <weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On 05/23/2011 11:07 PM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> <snip>
>> I believe a national digital library can be successful sans the
>> inclusion of licensed material.
> </snip>
>
> Bravo! I completely agree, only I would add an additional point: "a
> useful national digital library". A tool like this will obviously grow
> and evolve. Creating something that linked to *reliable* resources in a
> quick and easy way, plus resources that are *free* would clearly be
> popular with each and every person on the face of the earth. In business
> thinking, a resource with that many "eyeballs" would be very attractive
> and allows many options. There are millions and millions of these
> things, many of excellent quality and many others of the same quality as
> you will find in the copyrighted materials.
>
> Certainly it would be nice to include copyrighted materials, but if a
> tool for free resources began to get popular, I have no doubt that the
> copyright holders would want their share of those "eyeballs" and come to
> you. I keep referring to a paper by Marcia Bates "Improving User Access
> to Library Catalog and Portal Information"
> http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/2.3BatesReport6-03.doc.pdf written
> some time back, but it seems to continually make more and more sense.
> She writes:
>
> "Principle of least effort.
>
> Probably the single most frequently discovered finding on information
> seeking behavior is that people use the principle of least effort in
> their information seeking. This may seem reasonable and obvious, but the
> full significance of this finding must be understood. People do not just
> use information that is easy to find; they even use information they
> know to be of poor quality and less reliable--so long as it requires
> little effort to find--rather than using information they know to be of
> high quality and reliable, though harder to find. Research on this
> behavior dates at least as far back as the 1960s, when a major study
> demonstrated that physicians tended to rely on drug company salesmen for
> drug information, rather than consulting the research literature.
> (Coleman, Katz, & Menzel, 1967). Poole reviewed dozens of these studies
> in 1985 (Poole, 1985); Mann has a more recent review (Mann, 1992)."
>
> This completely reflects my own experience of my patrons' behavior as
> well as (I confess) my own. Make it easy, make it free and you make
> something that the public will love.
>
> I hated that movie, but in this case I really believe it:
> "Build it and they will come"
>
> --
> James L. Weinheimer weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
> First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
> Cooperative Cataloging Rules:
> http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
>
Received on Tue May 24 2011 - 07:37:26 EDT