Libraries Are 31337 234
Many people may hold the image of a librarian as a shushing school marm who does little more than stamp and shelve books because that's all they've seen librarians do. Well think again - that's about as inaccurate as believing that Alan Greenspan is nothing more than a glorified bank teller. The job titles may change but the mission of the profession remains the same: organize information and help people find it. Libraries have been around a lot longer than the Internet, and even library technology can hold its own with the best out there. For example, Google's savvy results ranking was hardly the birth of citation analysis (next up: metadata - cough, cataloging, cough), and there are enormous library systems that also predate the Internet.
Although library geeks and technology nerds may have contrary images, in today's world the boundary between the career of the librarian and the information technologist is disappearing. Librarians today not only administer Web servers and dynamic databases to help manage large digital collections and thousands of electronic resources, they teach people how to use library systems. And just as enlightened computer engineers are advocates of noncommercial software and campaign for online rights, the library profession has a long history of staunchly defending freedom - from book burnings to the FBI's Library Awareness Program to the latest copyright battles and almost all other current issues in intellectual freedom.
Check out LISNews.com (recognize the format?) and some library blogs if you're interested in reading more about real librarians.
librarians (Score:3, Insightful)
what every library needs is... (Score:5, Insightful)
In modern day life every town/city library could present the books electronically for the benefit of it's citizens, or indeed the world.
But because of copyright this will never be allowed to happen to the majority of books.
People in this communitity have only recently (in the last five to ten years) started to wake up and realise that technology is not a limiting factor anymore, the legal system is. Librarians probably knew this all along and have not been worried about becoming redundant.
If anything the Internet and libraries can probably learn more from each other than you realise.
Librarians may be depicted in a less than flattering way in the media, but how many people actually visit libraries outside of schooling these days? I myself visit Borders book store, browse, listen to music, have a coffee and chat with my friends most saturdays, but in a library I wouldn't be able to find the latest titles or enjoy myself. Compared to retail a library is a staid boring authoritarian place, which is why the staff of these valuable institutions are depicted in this way.
If they want to change their perception let's encourgage them to change their work place.
--
Sadly, whilst we value knowledge, it will be limited, rationed and paid for. When we cease to value knowledge we will have no use for it.
(me)
Just So (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, she is frequently coopted to help with IT problems, since the IT manager doesn't have a staff. One time, she had to manually recover three days worth of circulation info when some moron from the school district turned off the server without shutting everything down properly.
It scares me when she talks about how much she loves cataloguing, though.
Isaac Asimov's hero was a librarian! (Score:2, Insightful)
books. Maybe a little too old-fashioned. Also the computers are quite funny.
Librarians (Score:2, Insightful)
You can send your kudos to the local LIBRARY for their "3733t" tech, but take it from one who is there: give the props to the library tech staff.
Most libraries don't have techs, and those libraries tend to be little but spam relays and porno repositories. Would be nice to convince all those libraries they need a tech. That's a lot of jobs out there, if you're wondering.
Re:what every library needs is... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd just like to point out that this is because of the publishers application of their copyright rights, rather than because of copyright itself. They have chosen to restrict supply of their property to only people who can acquire a physical copy (be it bookstore or library), with a bias towards people who pay for it.
Having made extensive use of libraries when I was younger I can appreciate their immense value (I still think of them as smaller, slower internets from before the day...) but also appreciate what a digital library would mean to publishers. Most of the solutions I can think of only involve crippling digital distribution to match the shortcomings of print distribution, not an acceptable way of dealing with changing technology but one we seem to be stuck with in lieu of creative new business plans from publishers.
For the record, I think librarians are cool, 'cause if they are I stand a better chance of also being cool one day...
Re:what every library needs is... (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was a student I used the college library a lot, mainly because it was the only place I could use Apple Mac's at the time (Mac Pluses!).
I also used the school library a lot, amazingly because I found it better than the local public library (I was lucky to go to a very successful boy's Grammar school).
Recently I was asked by my boss to find some information for his kids' homework using the net at work. A fact which reinforced my view that kids don't use the library much anymore. When you've got Encarta on a cd/dvd at home and a net connection it's a hundred times quicker and useful for a school kid than actually visiting a library. If I were a kid again I bet I'd be online just as much as I am nowdays as an IT professional.
One of the reasons that libraries are useful is that they are free and open up access to knowledge
and learning to those without the funds to pay for the books. I wouldn't mind paying for the priviledge to use the library more if they had a better selection of books.
The current library system here in the UK is supported by the local authority, which means that our local taxes pay for the books. If no one visits the library there isn't much justification for paying for nice new books.
Re:what every library needs is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just Call it a LIBRARY, Please! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:what every library needs is... (Score:3, Insightful)
I entirely agree for research into factual items. My fiancee has recently 'gone back to school' and put herself through a four-year college course to become a qualified dispensing optician. Day release, so she had to wait a week between asking questions of her tutors. In this situation, the net was invaluable - we found online optics papers all over the place (quite a lot at the University of Texas, I seem to remember, and we're in the UK).
There's always fiction however. That doesn't yet lend itself to web publishing, in my opinion. Well, at least not online reading anyway - you could always download and print. Just as important as factual research is the broadening of the mind that comes with reading a 'good' piece of fiction. Your definition of good might be different to mine, but I'm sure you'll see what I mean.
Cheers,
Ian
And in a related essay... (Score:1, Insightful)
Many people think of their garbage men as "those guys who pick up the garbage". Some get their perception from movies like "Men at Work". Have you ever stopped to think about what a Garbage Man really does?
Sure, the job involves dumping your garbage can into his garbage can. But what happens when there are two garbage cans? Only a highly trained and skilled garbage man can notice the difference between one garbage can and two garbage cans. One can only begin to imagine the complexities of three garbage cans!
So, a Garbage Man is more than "that guy picking up the garbage". He is your Sanitation Engineer - saving your life every day.
Re:Libraries don't need to be "elite" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Librarians (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean the way musicians have become tenders of electronic equipment?
Really, this is not likely to happen until the AI and natural language capabilities of computers reach the point where they understand what we mean and can figure out what we should be looking for.
Librarians are politically active, unlike geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, I do not say that ALL geeks are not politcally active, or that every geek is a weekday rebel of IP laws. But everyone must agree that too many people here say a lot of shit, and in the end do very little shit about it. Its merely saddening.
The big reason that libraries are cool: (Score:4, Insightful)
Libraries should be left as low tech as possible, to allow the largest group of people possible free and easy access to information.
Re:call em information broker (Score:2, Insightful)
Either way, librarians would do very well for themselves in the process, and gain thousands of jobs.
The reason we haven't gone to all-digital collections is that it would cost a tremendous amount of money that we don't as a society want to spend, and the resulting benefit would be tiny in comparison. (A marginal increase in researching speed in exchange for a massive societal investment.)
Real research - vs. just typing terms into Google - is an intensive process that takes real time, and using a print library actually increases the efficiency of that research.
This post is simply lazy, lazy thinking.
And a side point (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I'm not a librarian I think people sometimes lose sight of the fact that libraries are in many ways a foundation of democracy and freedom.
A bit over the top, you say? Well, libraries go hand-in-hand with free education, which most people consider a basic right. They also provide free access to information, often information critical of government or other establishments. Libraries provide uninhibited access to information for rich or poor, white or black. Many of us take for granted the ability to buy a $20 book and read it at our leisure, but just because we're largely a rich society does not magically make your local Barnes & Noble a "noble" enterprise. But your local library is.
In fact, readers of Slashdot who believe in freedom of information should be vehemently in support of libraries as the original source of the concept that information should be freely available to the populace. Recent copyright laws attack the library establishment as much as they do individuals. While the concept of rows of dust-covered tomes my be getting a bit outdated, libraries are actually about education and access to information, not just books...
Re:Just Call it a LIBRARY, Please! (Score:5, Insightful)
You must not have checked out the books I did then (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, they didn't have a lot of pictures of Nekkid Wimmin, but like a certain magazine [variations.com] likes to say, they have "Porn for nerds. Babes that matter."
Authors like Anais Nin, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Camille Paglia, and Nancy Friday are the ones I can remember right off the top of my head, and I've also found a whole host of compilations [amazon.com] of erotic short stories by a vast number of authors.
And on top of the porn there's also tons of truly informative stuff on human sexuality in public libraries. "The New Kinsey Report," "Female sexual awareness," and "The Erotic Mind," are books that helped enlighten me, and there are now literally hundreds [ipac3.vpl.ca] of newer titles can be found just by using my library's web page search engine.
Perhaps the library doesn't have *as much* porn as the Internet does, but 99% of what's on the net is crap, and what the library has is all the truly worthwhile stuff. No credit card required!
Re:Just Call it a LIBRARY, Please! (Score:3, Insightful)
Correction: Confusing, euphemistic titles ARE political correctness.
I could go on, but I probably shouldn't.
Re:Librarians (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And a side point (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Librarians (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The big reason that libraries are cool: (Score:2, Insightful)
Using your logic, libraries should only have picture books since those who are illiterate would not have access to the knowledge in books with words in them.
You can never totaly prevent marginalization. You can only provide access to all the tools and encourage people to learn to use them.
Libraries are... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now the best way to access scholarly information (in those thousands of academic journals) is through full text databases such as Ebscohost, Proquest, and Infotrac. These databases contain millions of articles. A fraction of a percent of this informaiton is available on the free web. By comparison, the free web looks like crap.
You can not simply pay to use these databases as an individual user, either by subscription or on a pay-per-view basis (though there are a couple of minor exceptions to this). As a rule, access to these databases is through libraries. If you are a student, faculty or staff member at a university, you have access to dozens of these databases through the library. That's right, it's the library that enters into contracts to provide access to these databases to users. (And that access is usually remote, via passwords.)
There are versions of these databases that provide high-quality information for the general public, rather than specifically for acadmic use, and again it's mainly companies like ProQuest, Infotrac and EbscoHost who create these databases. The public-oriented versions of these databases are available for free at your public library. Again, they make the "free" web look like crap.
It's not only because these databases are paid for by libraries that they are part of the library world; it's also because these companies employ librarians, and also because they incorporate strong indexing according to standards developed in the library world to make the right information easily accessible.
Libraries are electronic to a much higher degree than most posters here seem to realize. It goes far beyond having internet access available at the library, though that is a good thing. It is to the point where a large and growing portion of the information that libraries pay for (using your tax money or tuition fees) IS electronic.
But I say this at the risk of discounting the present importance of books. While I think most written communication will "go electronic" eventually, librarians know that we are far from there now. What is valuable about books isn't the fact that they are on paper; it's the fact that they represent comprehensive intellectual effort and an investment of time that you don't find in journal and magazine articles. And at present, they are rarely published electronically. So, at present, it's incumbent upon librarians to provide information in book form.
I am a librarian (who uses linux at home).
I have a short manifesto about the value of libraries, at http://libr.org/Juice/manifesto.html [libr.org].
I'd also like to direct your attention to an article from the journal Progressive Librarian which argues the importance of keeping paper, called "Why Do We Need to Keep This in Print? It's on the Web...": A Review of Electronic Archiving Issues and Problems, by Dorothy Warner: http://libr.org/PL/19-20_Warner.html [libr.org]. I'm sure that it could create a good discussion here in its own right, as many of you would disagree with it strongly. I post it here to point out that librarians who have not joined the "information party" they way that young techies have have reasons for their reluctance and are thoughtful in their criticism. But I can't say that without remarking that librarians are also a diverse group, which includes luddites and young techies alike.
Re:Too long (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but his site didn't get
That's gotta be good for something.
Re:what every library needs is... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a laptop with a 1600x1200 screen, and it doesn't remotely replace a book. The resolution is still too low (even with sub-pixel anti-aliasing - ClearType on XP), it's heavy, it's warm, the fan comes on every so often, it runs out of batteries, I can't use it one-handed one the London Underground...
Nope. Still books for the moment.
Cheers,
Ian