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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.
Can someone summarize this in one sentence, I'm not going to read all that.
kthx
call them information broker, and the jobs sounds fancy again.
librarians are old-fashioned only as long as they stick to storing information on paper instead of creating networked, digital libraries. the first will protect there jobs, probably, the latter is going to save us researchers/users/customers more and more time.
Here in Houston, the public library system is on the cutting edge of rolling out free public 802.11b access in all their libraries. A guy from the library system regularly comes to our Houston Wireless user group meetings, and that alone speaks volumes, because I don't see any companies sending representatives.
What's your damage, Heather?
"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"
I'm obviously not many people, because whenever I think of a librarian, I keep seeing Britney Spears in various stages of undress while surrounded by books...and wearing glasses. You know, *those* glasses.. the ones that say "I'm the HEAD librarian."
Yeah, those...
Coming from a guy that works in a library, Librarians are abuot as l337 as the people that feel is cool to type in l337.
... script kiddies love using them to launch attacks from ...
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.
--
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
... a while back. Right from their site:
"Although the general public often seems surprised when librarians don't fit their pre-conceived image, the profession has celebrated its own differences for years. Librarians are funny, irreverent, interesting, and often radical people. Though popular culture includes considerable library material, it often ignores those on the fringe."
PDHoss
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
Librarians can access information more efficiently since they know how to search.
As these special searching mechanisms are made into algorithms, I think librarians will become tenders of technology and book shelvers (unless that's automated as well), not the guides that they were years ago and, to some extent, are today. This situation kinda resembles the Kramnik/Fritz thing...
Librarians do one heck of a lot more than we, as patrons, see them do. I never really appreciated how much until my mother got a job as a school librarian. She spends long hours working on catalogues, organizing book fairs, and doing research to help teachers find the best supplementary material for their classes.
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.
Librarians use photocopiers, and help others to do likewise. Photocopiers can copy whole books, which is in breach of copyright laws.
Stop the pirate rings! Gaol all librarians!
OLPC Australia
I have a library degree.
In "library school" things I learned about included information architecture, web design, HTML, XML, Javascript and CSS, metadata, authentication and authenticity, network and information security, databases (Access, mySQL) how to install and run Linux, and most importantly how to organize and present information. It was library school that introduced me to Open Source adn Free Software. The basic fuctions and principles of libraries and librarians are probably the most useful of the bunch, even in my current tech job.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
There is a online radio show, called "Tales from the Afternow" which is being told by a Librarian from the future, where everything is copyrighted by mega corps, and he (the librarian) is a criminal for sharing info freely.
www.theafternow.com
Give a listen, all the episodes are free and in MP3 format.
A good thing about the American Library Assocition, there are against DMCA and other potential laws that reduce fair use. That is a good thing for open source.
These primary historical documents reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The Library of Congress does not endorse the views expressed in these collections, which may contain materials offensive to some readers.
I think they cut and pasted this from a PrOn site!
(Score:6, unfuckingbelievable)
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
...for the same reason serious Linux users don't use Linux to be cool.
Every dollar spent on technology is a dollar that doesn't go toward buying another book. It pained me to hear librarians who, when asked on a local radio show what they would do with $100,000, would spend it all on IT when their book collections are so modest.
Sharing the Internet with the public is a worthy goal, but for most avenues of knowledge, books and periodicals are still the way to go. When authors decide to spend the years it takes to create a great book, they publish it on paper so they can make money, not on the web. Librarians realize this and focus their efforts on creating collections of printed works that are carefully catalogued and chosen for their intellectual value.
Sharing local collections with the world is being undertaken by the Library of Congress in two separate projects. National works of art are at http://memory.loc.gov/, and the LOC is helping other countries with putting their materials online at http://international.loc.gov/.
Have to attend for the purposes of work conventions of librarians. Specificlaly, there are the Medical Library Association and Science Library association. They are by far, outside the the technical IT etc. community the most technically proficient binch around. They are often os "up" on technology as i am.
I also worked IT support for a large university for a while, and can further attest to the technical proficiency of librarians with the following: Not only were the professional librarians some of the easiest customers to work with they had difficulties, they rarely, if ever had the same problem twice, if the problem in question was something that could be resolved by simpl having watched and asked me about what I was doing. Made for easy library server maintenance. They wanted them down less than I did.
...by the number of references (a.k.a links) in the text.
The biggest impediment to the type of access you describe nowadays isn't the technology, it's capitalism and all its derivatives, such as copyright.
Case in point: A few years ago, the ebook vendor netLibrary offered an offline reader. This product was removed due to publisher paranoia. Currently you can only view netLibrary titles one page at a time while connected to the Internet. Furthermore, despite the medium, only one patron per purchasing library can check out a book at any given time. But never fear, now they're offering - for an extra fee - the ability to use a (somewhat) DRM crippled offline reader.
Publishers are about as up to date with technology and new pricing models as the RIAA. Copyrights disputes have been cited as the reason several publishers have pulled their titles from full-text databases. So instead of moving towards the single search box method for library resources, we now have hundreds of competing library database vendors, each with different coverage and search interfaces. It is the most difficulty time in history to do library research (and the slack that Google is picking up is a detriment to research skills) not just because of varying library materials formats, but because of copyright.
Libraries Are 31337
Same went for other impressive efforts to rename things: PE -> LLW Life Long Wellness, Admissions Office -> Welcome Center, etc.
A true professional should know how to position themselves so the public can find them. Confusing, euphemistic titles are as bad as Political Correctness in my book. If anyone thinks otherwise, try running a bond issue on a ballot for something other than Library and see how many votes it nets you.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Disturbing fact: A number of years ago, I worked as a library custodian; my responsibilities included throwing away the donated books the librarians didn't think they could sell. It frequently amounted to several hundred books a week, many of them very cool. (My personal library certainly benefitted.) I doubt this is true of all libraries, but at that particular library, donated books never made it into the stacks. I've been a lot less enthusiastic about donating ever since.
It is clear that just as computer geeks naturally select themselves as computer people, librarians do the same. They like books, research, and then tend to be very rigid in their outlook on work and life.
In addition to their natural tendancies, the American Library Association has not helped matters. It is controlled by a bunch of introspective, vision-less, and rigid nay-sayers. Go to the ALA web site and see what kinds of literature they are currently offering! See anything about how to design cataloging systems? See much about information management? nope. Then, beyond that, ALA's been very successful locking up big chunks of their corner of the world with locking up job descriptions to ALA accreditation which requires a visionless curriculum.
I think it is hopeless until most current library managers a retired and a new crop that is not afraid of innovation and change come to the fore front.
So do I wish Librarians would come to the information party in a contemporary way? Absolutely! Alas I have very little hope that it will happen anytime in the near future.
-- Multics
P.S. at a recent conference I attended, one of the speakers argued "partner with a librarian!" (for research projects, not p0rn) Several of us talked with him after his presentation and said that we'd tried, but they were too far out-of-touch and he replied that his experience was clearly the exception.
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...
One of the first things I did when I took on the responsibility of managing a dev team was to hire a librarian. (A real, trained librarian, not a "code librarian".)
It was the best investment I ever made. It didn't take long before virtually everyone's first stop with a question was the library/librarian. Reference material, competitive info, standards, you name it... the librarian knew how to take piles of information in whatever form and organize it, make it accessible, and make it far more usable to everyone.
If you have a dev group of more than 15-20, your dev group is wasting time and money by not having a professional librarian on the team. It's a job that's part administrivia, part science, and part art. I have yet to find any other discipline that blends those parts as effectively as library science.
(I have to admit I've always had a soft spot for librarians, probably because I spent so much time in libraries. I have also been extremely impressed by librarians understanding of applying technology for information management, and the very progressive ideas that came out of library sciences. That doesn't always translate to high tech libraries or systems, but that's more often than not a funding issue.)
So you see, it's not that simple. If you're thinking of bringing a pile of damaged, marked up, dirty books to the library so you can feel like you've done some kind of public service, save yourself the trouble. We're already understaffed and underpaid, and we don't really have much in the way of spare time to sort through your garbage so you can feel like a champion of philanthropy. If you have good, clean, undamaged books, CDs, videos, DVDs, software (especially certification test materials--that stuff gets stolen so fast you wouldn't believe it), by all means, bring them in; we'll even send you a thank-you note. But don't act like it entitles you to dictate what becomes of them or like that one donation should exempt you from overdue fees for life.
-phatty 2x4
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
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.