Re: Bill Clinton: Create Internet agency

David H. Rothman wrote :  

> Maybe we can say that the role of librarians is for 
> them to encourage patrons to be their own truth-
> seekers, just so the users have the facts to be 
> intelligent about it.

Maybe we can in fact better refrain from saying that. 
It still sounds pretty patronizing ( and condescending ) 
to me, though possibly I'm misreading just where 
you're coming from. Anyway, for my money, James 
Rettig ( the well-known reference specialist and former 
ALA president ) was much more nearly on target when 
he wrote almost twenty years ago, as an admonition to 
all over-zealous colleagues :  "every information seeker 
should be free of the librarian's expectations" -- in an 
article not accidentally entitled "Self-determining 
information seekers" ( RQ 32 [1992], p.158-163 ). 
Recommended.


- Laval Hunsucker
   Breukelen, Nederland



----- Original Message ----
From: David H. Rothman <davidrothman_at_POBOX.COM>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Mon, May 23, 2011 9:10:22 PM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Bill Clinton: Create Internet agency

Thanks for the links and further thoughts, Jim.

I couldn't agree with you more about the usefulness of context during
the discovery process.

Same on the handing of your globalization books. Maybe we can say that
the role of librarians is for them to encourage patrons to be their
own truth-seekers, just so the users have the facts to be intelligent
about it.

>  Public librarians would have much more experience than academic librarians.

Definitely on appropriateness matters, given the wider range of people
publibs serve.

And yet I fear that for reasons unrelated to actual merit--for
example, the close ties between elite universities and the social and
finanical elites--the publibs may lose out in a joint system.

Interestingly, speaking of the just-given example of globalization
books, this is one fear I have about a common academic-publib system.
Elite academics tend to love the cosmopolitan approach. Typical publib
users want what is most immediately relevant to them--hence, my
appreciation of Nate's interest in featuring local context.

The solution could be to make it easy for publibs to localize the
national publib collection, while also providing ways for patrons to
go elsewhere if they prefer, so no one feels restricted. In fact, this
is why I think patrons should be able to access both public and
scholarly systems directly.

All I know is that publibs should be careful: look at the fuss over
shedding MLS librarians in favor of Ph.D. subject specialists
(http://acrlog.org/2011/04/13/why-all-the-fuss-over-phd-academic-librarians/).
Would a common system significantly worsen these conflicts? Very
possibly.

I love the idea of the Net expanding content possibilities for
patrons, of delinking knowledge and geography, but if publibs lose
their distinctive identities or someday go out of business entirely,
because of a fixation on national and global content, then we'll all
be the poorer.

Detail--a little too much of a digression, but still irresistible: I
dropped by the Golden Notebook and found the interface to be wanting;
in fact, rather primitive. I'd like it to be extra-easy to drill right
down to the sentence level, with comments displayed as the cursor
passed over the relevant words. I'd prefer a comments interface built
on the dictionary-highlights-and-notes system now used in the Kindle
app on the iPad and perhaps elsewhere. Something with a "select"
feature more precise than paragraphs. For now, the Kindle does show
the most commented-on passages but doesn't break them into individual
comments. Needless to say, both internal and external social
networking features could be baked in. Do you or anyone else know of
an interface similar to what I've proposed for both detailed viewing
of comments and response to them? It might very well exist already! Or
maybe Amazon has it coming.

David Rothman
Co-Founder, LibraryCity.org
@librarycity
703.370.6540
Looking for contributing writers--especially librarians