Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

< 7:13:24 PM        >

Will was reading Moby Lives when he came across a link to an article called Revolution in the Stacks. He knew it would infuriate me, and he was right.

"The library is among our most revered institutions. Librarians in turn are known for their personal integrity, their loyalty to the collections in their care, their passionate love for their profession and their sense of responsibility to society at large. These qualities were also implicit in the challenges addressed by the 92nd Conference of German Librarians, which took place last week in Augsburg.

As a result, the library's responsibility as a source of informational skills, as a provider of multimedia teaching materials and as a propagator of electronic publications was a key part of the conference's agenda. Libraries aim to compete with commercial publishers so as to lower the exorbitant price of obtaining scientific information and ameliorate, in the interests of science, the "library crisis" these skyrocketing prices have triggered.

Germany's librarians are worried about how they will cope with all these new tasks and are calling for more money not only to buy more journals and books, but also to set up digital infrastructure and train additional staff. What they really want, however, is to retain custody of a child that is ready to leave home. Yet if they want this youngster to remain theirs, the nation's libraries will first have to learn to let go....

It says a lot for the librarians' sense of civic duty when they offer to help kindergartens, schools and universities improve their "information competence." But it is still a case of the lame leading the blind. After all, the creation of "information competence" is a responsibility of the educational institutions themselves and not archives. Politicians must grant Germany's schools and universities greater autonomy, while at the same time encouraging competition for the best methods among private educational establishments.

Technology drives not only politics, but business, too. Digital technology has split the confluence of medium and content hitherto known as the book. While information's infrastructure is public domain, information itself is a private commodity. Intermediaries such as booksellers and librarians have now become superfluous in certain areas of the information market. This is especially true in the realm of scientific, medical and technical literature, which by trying to combine two incompatible functions is both expensive and inefficient....

One of the yardsticks often used to measure academic prowess is the number of papers published in scientific journals and the frequency with which a person is cited. This dual purpose is not only having an inflationary impact on the price of scientific journals, but it is also reducing libraries to the status of parking lots used for the exchange of cash-stuffed briefcases. One solution to this problem would be to make certain individual papers available directly, with authors contributing financially to some degree. Librarians, as a result, would become superfluous....

What about the humanities? Surely they, too, are being left behind in much the same way as are the libraries themselves, with their mandate of promoting arts and culture. A distinction is necessary here between virtualized collections of teaching materials and specialized libraries based on specific archives or subject matter. The Internet could serve in the national reorganization and concentration of Germany's humanities libraries as an exchange, through which long-term loans could be arranged, adding them to temporary collections. For this to be possible, however, librarians themselves will first have to rid themselves of their fixation on ever-larger holdings and learn to appreciate the difference between inherent property rights and the joys of temporarily loaning one's charges to the wider world." [F.A.Z.]

This piece was obviously written by someone that doesn't use public, school, or special libraries and only interacts with academic libraries in one specific way. Who does the author expect to teach "information competence" to kids? The teachers? Those teachers that are already overworked and underpaid? And how will they know indexing, searching, cataloging, and cross-referencing well enough to teach it? That's not their job, although it is the school librarian's job.

Not to mention the fact that we need librarians more than ever to mediate information specifically because there is so much of it. Who's going to catalog and index all of this stuff the author thinks he'll find so easily now. Is that working well for you on the web now? Do you always find what you need on the web? And if information is a private commodity, how will most folks have access to it? Not everyone can afford subscriptions, not everyone wants subscriptions, and most folks don't even know what they need to subscribe to in order to get the one piece of information they want!

I could go on, but I'll just end this with a loud "AARGH!"

comments < 7:10:47 PM        >

Serendipity! Multiple Google News Feeds from The Loebrichs:

"My aggregator brought in an interesting story from The Shifted Librarian mentioning that Ken Rawlings had made a Google News Feed based on Bryce Yehl's wishlist. I thought to myself, great, I can stop using the stopgap feed I made using Mark Paschal's Stapler on March 16th. Unfortunately, the titles only format, while short, missed out on one of my favorite features of Google News, multiple sources with different points of view. This did spur me to both try out RSSDistiller and break my feed into seven feeds so each Google category can have its own.

Google Business News
Google Entertainment News
Google Headline News
Google Sports News
Google Technology News
Google US News
Google World News

Now I don't need to manually delete all the business and sports stories when I aggregate."

This is even better because you get a lot of Google headlines in your aggregator, and this lets me narrowcast them even further based on my individual preferences! Thanks, Bruce!

[The Shifted Librarian]
comments < 7:10:01 PM        >

Canon post PowerShot firmware updates. Canon BeBit has today posted firmware updates for the following cameras: PowerShot A10, PowerShot A20, PowerShot S30, PowerShot S40, PowerShot G2, DIGITAL IXUS v (S110), DIGITAL IXUS 300 (S300). Across all... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]
comments < 7:06:22 PM        >

Gates to take stand in antitrust trial. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is scheduled to make his first appearance on the witness stand next week as part of the continuing antitrust trial. [CNET News.com]
comments < 7:05:20 PM        >

Ex-Apple staff debut palm-sized PC. WinXP in the hand? [The Register]
comments < 7:04:19 PM        >

WinInfo Short Takes: Week of April 22. An irreverent look at some of the week's other news, including lots of WinHEC and Microsoft remedy hearings news, Windows XP sales, Microsoft revenues, Xbox, and much, much mor [Windows Informant]
comments < 7:03:43 PM        >