Name:
Location: Madison, Wisconsin, United States

A library science student with a bit too much time on her hands.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Readings for 27 November 2006

"Redefining the Library" by Richard E. Rubin

I find it interesting that Rubin sees technology as increasing in changes and innovations the closer we get to the present. I'm assuming that he has left out all of those technological changes that libraries invested in but did not end up to be winners. I realize that this article was not about technologies that have failed, but it would be nice to see more about what hasn't worked in the context of libraries. We don't learn from mistakes unless we know that they've been made; without having read Double Fold, I would have no idea that microfilming resulted in the loss of paper copies that are, in some instances, priceless. This article by Rubin seems to be an instance of blind acceptance of technology that works and ignoring the mistakes and missteps along the way.

"Libraries, Technology and People" by William Y. Arms

I think it's interesting that Arms chooses to focus on the benefits of the digital library. Some of the points that he makes out to be positive are definitely things that have dark sides, too. For instance, the point that information is easier to keep current is true. You can update stuff online at the drop of a hat. But what if I wanted information about what happened two years ago? Unless the administrators are keeping archives of all the changes (like Wikipedia), that information may be gone forever. For some uses, that's okay, but what if a researcher wants to look at the historical changes in attitudes toward a certain technology, like cloning? If you constantly get rid of the old information to replace it with new, that researcher will have nowhere to turn for the information he seeks. Thus, the issue of updating is more gray than Arms portrays it. Also, a lot of the talk about cost seems to mirror what was said about microfilming, which, as we all know, didn't exactly turn out to be eventually cheaper or more beneficial to users or libraries.

"Innovation and Research" by William Y. Arms

Arms does not provide a lot of information about the issue of scale. I think it's a very important issue, and wish that he had discussed it in more detail. It seems to be an insurmountable task to take a large library like Memorial Library and digitize and catalog all of its information. Forget the idea of making all of its texts searchable! It is, perhaps, a good thing that copyright covers so many items. The mere fact that so many things cannot be scanned and shared may make for a more manageable project. There still is an enormous amount of information to get into computers, but at least it seems more approachable if a lot of the material is discounted outright as being still under copyright. This ignores the fact that such a large database of information has the potential to have a lot of things go wrong. Items can be miscataloged, for sure, as well as there being an issue with overwhelming the patron. If a patron searches all the items scanned at full-text for a common word (e.g., spiders), will he be inundated with every page that happens to mention a spider? Or will we have to come up with clever searching aids that say, "I think this is what you're looking for"? We probably will; otherwise, we run the risk of alienating the patron.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home