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Libraries Are 31337
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.
the freedom to take a digital copy of the book, leaving the original on the shelf for someone who is not able to use a digital copy.
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.
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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)
/usr/bin/awake/too/long
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...
I think the reason that you are seeing more and more libraries given titles like "resource information center" is because most people think of a library as nothing more than a book repository. Many libraries today also have microfiche, videotapes, CD's, DVD's, software, and a network of computers with high-speed internet. Since many people will never discover any of this other good stuff because they think of the library as a place to go if you're looking for books, some libraries have taken to changing their title to more accurately reflect what they are.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
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.
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. 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.