Where it is theoretically something that's feasible, I'd have to say that you'd have to scale things very, very small indeed. Of course, this is theoretically possible to me on the same level that it's theoretically possible to capture all of the hot air from a committee meeting. On the other hand, with emerging nanotech, they might be able to invent something that can easily power a small gadget. It still looks like it would be least effort to employ either wind or solar in the meantime, though.
> There is no law prohibiting looking at porn on tax payer expense, is there? Aren't citizens "allowed" (or "have the right," if you will) to do what they please, provided it is not prohibited by the law of the land? I am not aware of a law allowing me walk down a publicly funded sidewalk in jeans and a t-shirt with a tennis-ball in my left hand, but I don't hesitate to do so because there is no law against it.
Oh, and don't forget, it is these adults (even the ones that look at porn on tax payer expense) that pay taxes. It is not just you and your upstanding, look-at-porn-only-at-home kind that pay taxes. It is our pocket that tax money comes from, not just yours. >
Precisely! That's why I *will* call the police if someone's whacking off to pr0n at the library, but I _can't_ if someone's just looking at it. There's a law against indecent exposure in most places. Unfortunately, most places still don't have laws against being a jerk.
Kids looking at pr0n shouldn't be an issue. They can't buy pr0n, so it's easy to tell them to whack off in someone else's trailer. The only pr0n surfer I had at my rural library is a kid, so it was easy to get him to stop.
Now adults technically have a right to look at pr0n over at the Library, which baffles me. I am a big advocate of getting recessed monitor desks. They're the perfect solution. Patrons can look at whatever they want to on the terminals, other patrons and staff can't. Unfortunately, they run like $500 a piece, which tends to be cost prohibitive.:(
Financial records are most certainly better in electronic format than they are on paper. On 9/11, the World Trade Centres were lost. Along with the tragic loss of life, there was an awful lot of data in those towers. Because systems were redundant, the financial information was elsewhere.
It's much easier to keep lots of copies of something in electronic form than it is in print. In this vein, some libraries have banded together to make stuff redundant.
Now, if there's total nuclear annihilation or your luddite WMD EMP, I sense there might be a larger problem than lost knowledge - like no remaining beings to read said wisdom.
While it probably doesn't *need* to be a gathering place, that *is* one of the functions of any library now.
I don't think too many people are certain about why this has happened, but I have my guesses. For one, you look smart if you are in the library. Some people like being seen as intelligent, and spend a lot of hangout time in the library as a result. There's also the ease of meeting. You can tell someone you can meet them at the library, and you know where that is. Generally, architects feel the need to make the library stand out from other buildings. It seems much shadier to tell a classmate to meet at 5th and Main to work on a group project, even though you can accomplish the same thing. Since people have this awful tendency to screw around instead of doing work, it's natural to take a break with someone else that's pouring over whatever it is they're reading. Reading just isn't as passive as some folks think, and there's a lot of discussion generated as a result. Theoretically, a professor should be helping out with this aspect, but what about the jerky ones that don't teach or clarify as well as they ought to? Enter the library for reinforcement and discussion purposes.
I know at my small rural public library people love to use us for a gathering spot. It's bigger than your living room. In some scary cases, it's better heated in winter and better cooled during the summer. Kids never have a problem telling their folks they're going to the library to meet a friend. When local folks want to impress the government types, they use the library because it's the nicest structure in town.
So yeah, the rest of the environment can theoretically serve that purpose, and I'm sure other things like computer labs and cafeteria do dual duty as well, but the library for some reason is increasingly pressed into a meeting space function. It's cool to watch:)
That would be nice. Unfortunately, there's this little thing called the DMCA, along with other laws, that get in the way of doing this. I think the best digitisation so far in my opinion can be seen in US Government documents. The GPO decided a while ago to start shifting towards online over print. They've officially declared that at this point. That's actually nice for a little public rural library like where I work, because we'd never be able to afford West in print or have space to house all of the Bills introduced in Congress, et cetera.
I had a discussion just yesterday about academic texts now including a CD of extra material related to the reading. A patron had been reading Swing, which is a fiction book about music, and it included a CD, much to the patron's surprise. But in any case, there are more and more books with CDs.
"That is why nothing can beat a book. No matter what story is told, the book is printed, and it will NOT change. You can't just take a bottle of white out and a pen and make a change. If you want to know what Lenin thought, you can find his words printed on paper. Somewhere, on a bookshelf, is a copy of his works. No matter how hard government tries to take away those books, they are out there, in attics, in basements, in places people forgot about."
Ummm, you are kidding, right? Texts in paper change *all of the time*. Particularly controversial works are often defaced - patrons rip pages out, black out portions, white out portions, write in portions.
A lot of the electronic scholarly works are protected by encryption, which I realise is its own problem.
Electronic format allows for greater diversity and wider readership because a borrower is not crippled by only having one physical copy to share with whoever wants it.
The First Amendment is what protects freedom to receive information, the Second Amendment has to do with militiae and guns.
When people do hack things, those works have a tendency to be revised back to what they stated in the first place.
Digitisation has accidentally given rise to government leaks that one certainly wouldn't have detected on paper. (Thank you government boobs who still do not understand that they needs lock the PDF.:)
Finally, this is NOT a public library. This is an academic library. There are very important differences.
How about online journals, for one. Why don't you visit the website for the U Texas Austin Libraries and check out the find a journal link? A lot of journals are online and full text, making physical copies less appealing. I seriously doubt anyone is going to be using Wikipedia just because the books are absorbed into other collections.
I can't believe that people who are financially minded actually pay for the favour of giving other people stock tips, but they do. Something's gone wrong. I would pay for content that a site develops, but as soon as I have to pay for my own opinion, I'm out of there.
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
As a librarian, I'd love to see a special ToS for libraries. That way, I wouldn't have to steal or hack to get music to my patrons. I would be willing to pay a premium for the songs. It seems like I would be covered under the current ToS, but I would have to keep track of how many times things were burned, listened to, et cetera. I wish I could tell them how many patrons we had, and just work a deal.
It's not about making the music free. It's making sure that users have fair use of something they bought. You still have to buy the songs. Did you read the article? Methinks not.
No, it's still not legal to plagiarise. Just because you place a work in the public domain does not mean that someone else can claim that they wrote your work. Because your words were your words on Slashdot, you can freely use them in your campaign speech later, provided that Slashdot doesn't have some disgusting EULA that I don't know about. It looks like you desperately need to take a look at
I used to be able to just laugh this thread off, knowing that if any of those scummy retailers out there *cough Best Buy cough* tried this kind of illegal business practice on me, I could head straight for Eliot Spitzer. Companies cower at that man's name. Now I'll just be screwed in two years.
But seriously, if people are doing the things people here are posting about (offering rebates after expiry, giving you a card that said you didn't get the rebate there on time - which I would document by paying the extra for tracking confirmation or photocopying the stamped envelope) then go to your state's attorney general or whatever their international equivalent is.
(As I write this, I realize that I don't know what shipping/mailing options libraries might offer these days - perhaps I should check that out;)
The answer is, it depends. If you have a good reason to not come to the Library (for example a disability) a lot of us will come to you. There's a rather complex regional system in place that helps with the delivery of ILLs, and we get special rates with the post.
However, many lending libraries don't do the direct to the patron thing because of a few different reasons. First, they'd much rather lend library to library. That way, if my library loses something, it can pay the other library for it. Second, the librarians are likely to give a proper citation and save the lenders some time.
I do like Google. It is useful. I'm not sure what you mean by index and not the material it represents. Indexing and cataloguing are two different dogs. In any case one uses google in a much different fashion than one uses a library catalogue. Google is very good for subject searching. I do greatly prefer a catalogue for author or title searching. Especially with linked headings. It's sort of like the difference between a search engine and a directory.
When I ILL most of the time, I don't usually pay shipping costs of any sort thanks to the complex ILL system I mentioned earlier. If I ILL something academic through OCLC and out of state, then I pay return shipping, which is small.
Malls, at least where I am, are dying. People want the one stop box store. Even this move is now being rethought. As far as libraries in a general civic space, this is happening. I'm not sure how I feel about it. We really do eat up a lot of space, and our space needs to be designed for certain purposes yet flexible for the future. (IE, the collection is always going to grow, so it needs someplace to grow to, all the while catering to quiet study, computers, children's programmes, etc.)
As far as computing goes, WiFi is great, but people still must physically sit someplace. That's the part that takes up the space. People love to sprawl with their paper work or snacks or what have you at the computer desk. So it's a few square feet for their chair, the keyboard, the monitor, even a tiny cpu. I must say I'm tempted to get in some Mac Minis, but they still have to be put someplace. Even if you were doing a dumb terminal sort of model, folks need to sit someplace. I suppose the problem is easier to grasp if you saw the confines of my library, which was built in the late 1800s. Which brings me to the point that we don't ask all the time for new buildings. Just on occassion;)
"Perhaps that latter thought will reinforce the opinion of the Blog Person who included "Michael Gorman is an idiot" in his reasoned critique, because no opinion that comes from someone who is "antidigital" (in the words of another Blog Person) could possibly be correct. For the record, though I may have associated with Antidigitalists, I am not and have never been a member of the Antidigitalist party and would be willing to testify to that under oath. I doubt even that would save me from being burned at the virtual stake, or, at best, being placed in a virtual pillory to be pelted with blogs. Ugh!"
Also, if one were to check the catalogue and come up with relevant titles, also in seconds, one could then use the index usually included in non fiction works to find something relevant for your paper. The whole process only takes a couple of minutes. He's arguing that it's more reliable to do what I just described than it is to just Google something in. In other words, Google is a great starting place, but a bad only resource.
All that aside, I love google. A lot of librarians love google. This is what got him in this mess in the first place. He dissed google. He got dissed for dissing google. This is his response to the librarian bloggers that dissed him dissing google. So unless you're a librarian blogger, he's not really talking to you.
The important point here is that he's an academic librarian. Academic librarians are very different creatures from public librarians. Further, he's dean of libraries. Even more relevant, he's a cataloguer. All of this adds up to the fact that he probably hasn't had to deal with a living breathing patron first hand for quite some time.
I'm willing to bet that the person responsible for collection development at that library is no good at Russian as a topic. Have you offered to help as a subject specialist and given them an idea of your educational background in the area? I know that I'd kill for that.
Second, remember that libraries are public for the most part and rely on tax dollars. There was a wee bit of time where it wasn't exactly politick to include books sympathetic to the USSR. A good librarian is meant to say "The heck with you folks, I'm going to collect neutrally anyway" but some don't. This climate also made it harsh on publishers. Even now, books are being banned over the whole Iraq issue.
Third, there may be other factors you're not aware of. For instance, the Russian collection at my library was *decimated* by mould. I had to weed everything that was infested.
I'm a small rural library duhrector, and I like to think that my little library can satisfy a good majority of the needs of my patrons. True, there are patrons who come in that need research grade materials, and I happily ILL them. If my library weren't where it is, patrons would have to travel even further to get to one that could serve its needs.
I'd also like to point out that different libraries have different constraints. Some people are anal retentive. There are fewer and fewer of those. In my library, eating responsibly is allowed. The idea is not to mess up the collection, or have giant rats roaming the library. If folks eat neatly, this is achieved. Just as I don't shush people unless someone tells me to. In fact, I tell my patrons all of the time that they can shush *me*. The idea here is that someone should be able to walk in and study in quiet if they want to. Were I to have a larger library, I would have quiet study space.
Gorman is regarded as the idiot he is in the circles I travel. He can't deal with bloggers not for the reasons he claims, but because he's often on the receiving end of everyone's ire. (Particularly library blogs.)
People as insecure as Gorman in LIS are
1) Old 2) Not well educated, but will defend the necessity of the MLS to their death 3) Not as computer literate as they ought to be
As to whoever said tear down the shelves and put up computers, have you considered DMCA?
I know a lot of stuff on our shelves might seem old, but I'd reckon that the vast majority of our collections are still within copyright.
I'd also argue that we're all trying to provide as much computer access as possible, but that it's just not possible in a lot of cases. Computers take up a LOT of space. We do want them. Space is at a premium in a lot of libraries, though, so we need to deal with what we've got. In the meantime, consider computers when you see all of those library building projects. A lot of those projects are caused by the need for more space for computers that the public rightfully demands.
Slashdot Mirror
Lord Nemesis, how do we get this to work?
Where it is theoretically something that's feasible, I'd have to say that you'd have to scale things very, very small indeed. Of course, this is theoretically possible to me on the same level that it's theoretically possible to capture all of the hot air from a committee meeting. On the other hand, with emerging nanotech, they might be able to invent something that can easily power a small gadget. It still looks like it would be least effort to employ either wind or solar in the meantime, though.
>
There is no law prohibiting looking at porn on tax payer expense, is there? Aren't citizens "allowed" (or "have the right," if you will) to do what they please, provided it is not prohibited by the law of the land? I am not aware of a law allowing me walk down a publicly funded sidewalk in jeans and a t-shirt with a tennis-ball in my left hand, but I don't hesitate to do so because there is no law against it.
Oh, and don't forget, it is these adults (even the ones that look at porn on tax payer expense) that pay taxes. It is not just you and your upstanding, look-at-porn-only-at-home kind that pay taxes. It is our pocket that tax money comes from, not just yours.
>
Precisely! That's why I *will* call the police if someone's whacking off to pr0n at the library, but I _can't_ if someone's just looking at it. There's a law against indecent exposure in most places. Unfortunately, most places still don't have laws against being a jerk.
Kids looking at pr0n shouldn't be an issue. They can't buy pr0n, so it's easy to tell them to whack off in someone else's trailer. The only pr0n surfer I had at my rural library is a kid, so it was easy to get him to stop.
:(
Now adults technically have a right to look at pr0n over at the Library, which baffles me. I am a big advocate of getting recessed monitor desks. They're the perfect solution. Patrons can look at whatever they want to on the terminals, other patrons and staff can't. Unfortunately, they run like $500 a piece, which tends to be cost prohibitive.
Are you wearing a tin foil hat?
Financial records are most certainly better in electronic format than they are on paper. On 9/11, the World Trade Centres were lost. Along with the tragic loss of life, there was an awful lot of data in those towers. Because systems were redundant, the financial information was elsewhere.
It's much easier to keep lots of copies of something in electronic form than it is in print. In this vein, some libraries have banded together to make stuff redundant.
Check out
http://lockss.stanford.edu/
Now, if there's total nuclear annihilation or your luddite WMD EMP, I sense there might be a larger problem than lost knowledge - like no remaining beings to read said wisdom.
While it probably doesn't *need* to be a gathering place, that *is* one of the functions of any library now.
:)
I don't think too many people are certain about why this has happened, but I have my guesses. For one, you look smart if you are in the library. Some people like being seen as intelligent, and spend a lot of hangout time in the library as a result. There's also the ease of meeting. You can tell someone you can meet them at the library, and you know where that is. Generally, architects feel the need to make the library stand out from other buildings. It seems much shadier to tell a classmate to meet at 5th and Main to work on a group project, even though you can accomplish the same thing. Since people have this awful tendency to screw around instead of doing work, it's natural to take a break with someone else that's pouring over whatever it is they're reading. Reading just isn't as passive as some folks think, and there's a lot of discussion generated as a result. Theoretically, a professor should be helping out with this aspect, but what about the jerky ones that don't teach or clarify as well as they ought to? Enter the library for reinforcement and discussion purposes.
I know at my small rural public library people love to use us for a gathering spot. It's bigger than your living room. In some scary cases, it's better heated in winter and better cooled during the summer. Kids never have a problem telling their folks they're going to the library to meet a friend. When local folks want to impress the government types, they use the library because it's the nicest structure in town.
So yeah, the rest of the environment can theoretically serve that purpose, and I'm sure other things like computer labs and cafeteria do dual duty as well, but the library for some reason is increasingly pressed into a meeting space function. It's cool to watch
That would be nice. Unfortunately, there's this little thing called the DMCA, along with other laws, that get in the way of doing this. I think the best digitisation so far in my opinion can be seen in US Government documents. The GPO decided a while ago to start shifting towards online over print. They've officially declared that at this point. That's actually nice for a little public rural library like where I work, because we'd never be able to afford West in print or have space to house all of the Bills introduced in Congress, et cetera.
I had a discussion just yesterday about academic texts now including a CD of extra material related to the reading. A patron had been reading Swing, which is a fiction book about music, and it included a CD, much to the patron's surprise. But in any case, there are more and more books with CDs.
"That is why nothing can beat a book. No matter what story is told, the book is printed, and it will NOT change. You can't just take a bottle of white out and a pen and make a change. If you want to know what Lenin thought, you can find his words printed on paper. Somewhere, on a bookshelf, is a copy of his works. No matter how hard government tries to take away those books, they are out there, in attics, in basements, in places people forgot about."
:)
Ummm, you are kidding, right? Texts in paper change *all of the time*. Particularly controversial works are often defaced - patrons rip pages out, black out portions, white out portions, write in portions.
A lot of the electronic scholarly works are protected by encryption, which I realise is its own problem.
Electronic format allows for greater diversity and wider readership because a borrower is not crippled by only having one physical copy to share with whoever wants it.
The First Amendment is what protects freedom to receive information, the Second Amendment has to do with militiae and guns.
When people do hack things, those works have a tendency to be revised back to what they stated in the first place.
Digitisation has accidentally given rise to government leaks that one certainly wouldn't have detected on paper. (Thank you government boobs who still do not understand that they needs lock the PDF.
Finally, this is NOT a public library. This is an academic library. There are very important differences.
How about online journals, for one. Why don't you visit the website for the U Texas Austin Libraries and check out the find a journal link? A lot of journals are online and full text, making physical copies less appealing. I seriously doubt anyone is going to be using Wikipedia just because the books are absorbed into other collections.
I can't believe that people who are financially minded actually pay for the favour of giving other people stock tips, but they do. Something's gone wrong. I would pay for content that a site develops, but as soon as I have to pay for my own opinion, I'm out of there.
you've got dough!
;)
S AP ICommand=WantItNowView&adId=6955863859
See, Intel wants it cause they lost their copy.
(If you have one, please split proceeds with my library
http://wantitnow.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcI
Um, you mean the bill that died in committee?
0 28:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:s.02
Thanks to WIPO, it doesn't matter if you're outside US shores. If your country signed the Berne Convention, you're hosed.
Article 11 - Obligations concerning Technological Measures
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
As a librarian, I'd love to see a special ToS for libraries. That way, I wouldn't have to steal or hack to get music to my patrons. I would be willing to pay a premium for the songs. It seems like I would be covered under the current ToS, but I would have to keep track of how many times things were burned, listened to, et cetera. I wish I could tell them how many patrons we had, and just work a deal.
It's not about making the music free. It's making sure that users have fair use of something they bought. You still have to buy the songs. Did you read the article? Methinks not.
No, it's still not legal to plagiarise. Just because you place a work in the public domain does not mean that someone else can claim that they wrote your work. Because your words were your words on Slashdot, you can freely use them in your campaign speech later, provided that Slashdot doesn't have some disgusting EULA that I don't know about. It looks like you desperately need to take a look at
http://www.altlawforum.org/lawmedia/CC.pdf
I used to be able to just laugh this thread off, knowing that if any of those scummy retailers out there *cough Best Buy cough* tried this kind of illegal business practice on me, I could head straight for Eliot Spitzer. Companies cower at that man's name. Now I'll just be screwed in two years.
But seriously, if people are doing the things people here are posting about (offering rebates after expiry, giving you a card that said you didn't get the rebate there on time - which I would document by paying the extra for tracking confirmation or photocopying the stamped envelope) then go to your state's attorney general or whatever their international equivalent is.
They're worse than M$ by far. Trust me.
(As I write this, I realize that I don't know what shipping/mailing options libraries might offer these days - perhaps I should check that out ;)
;)
The answer is, it depends. If you have a good reason to not come to the Library (for example a disability) a lot of us will come to you. There's a rather complex regional system in place that helps with the delivery of ILLs, and we get special rates with the post.
However, many lending libraries don't do the direct to the patron thing because of a few different reasons. First, they'd much rather lend library to library. That way, if my library loses something, it can pay the other library for it. Second, the librarians are likely to give a proper citation and save the lenders some time.
I do like Google. It is useful. I'm not sure what you mean by index and not the material it represents. Indexing and cataloguing are two different dogs. In any case one uses google in a much different fashion than one uses a library catalogue. Google is very good for subject searching. I do greatly prefer a catalogue for author or title searching. Especially with linked headings. It's sort of like the difference between a search engine and a directory.
When I ILL most of the time, I don't usually pay shipping costs of any sort thanks to the complex ILL system I mentioned earlier. If I ILL something academic through OCLC and out of state, then I pay return shipping, which is small.
Malls, at least where I am, are dying. People want the one stop box store. Even this move is now being rethought. As far as libraries in a general civic space, this is happening. I'm not sure how I feel about it. We really do eat up a lot of space, and our space needs to be designed for certain purposes yet flexible for the future. (IE, the collection is always going to grow, so it needs someplace to grow to, all the while catering to quiet study, computers, children's programmes, etc.)
As far as computing goes, WiFi is great, but people still must physically sit someplace. That's the part that takes up the space. People love to sprawl with their paper work or snacks or what have you at the computer desk. So it's a few square feet for their chair, the keyboard, the monitor, even a tiny cpu. I must say I'm tempted to get in some Mac Minis, but they still have to be put someplace. Even if you were doing a dumb terminal sort of model, folks need to sit someplace. I suppose the problem is easier to grasp if you saw the confines of my library, which was built in the late 1800s. Which brings me to the point that we don't ask all the time for new buildings. Just on occassion
Actually, it very much does. Both the act and a very good description of its implications are available here
http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/primer.html
Many libraries do distribute in digital form as well.
Library Journal isn't a blog at all. It's a journal. It's kind of like how you can read The Journal of the American Medical Association online
;)
http://jama.ama-assn.org/
or in print.
Now, if you're reading journals, I have to wonder about you
See:
"Perhaps that latter thought will reinforce the opinion of the Blog Person who included "Michael Gorman is an idiot" in his reasoned critique, because no opinion that comes from someone who is "antidigital" (in the words of another Blog Person) could possibly be correct. For the record, though I may have associated with Antidigitalists, I am not and have never been a member of the Antidigitalist party and would be willing to testify to that under oath. I doubt even that would save me from being burned at the virtual stake, or, at best, being placed in a virtual pillory to be pelted with blogs. Ugh!"
Also, if one were to check the catalogue and come up with relevant titles, also in seconds, one could then use the index usually included in non fiction works to find something relevant for your paper. The whole process only takes a couple of minutes. He's arguing that it's more reliable to do what I just described than it is to just Google something in. In other words, Google is a great starting place, but a bad only resource.
All that aside, I love google. A lot of librarians love google. This is what got him in this mess in the first place. He dissed google. He got dissed for dissing google. This is his response to the librarian bloggers that dissed him dissing google. So unless you're a librarian blogger, he's not really talking to you.
The important point here is that he's an academic librarian. Academic librarians are very different creatures from public librarians. Further, he's dean of libraries. Even more relevant, he's a cataloguer. All of this adds up to the fact that he probably hasn't had to deal with a living breathing patron first hand for quite some time.
I'm willing to bet that the person responsible for collection development at that library is no good at Russian as a topic. Have you offered to help as a subject specialist and given them an idea of your educational background in the area? I know that I'd kill for that.
Second, remember that libraries are public for the most part and rely on tax dollars. There was a wee bit of time where it wasn't exactly politick to include books sympathetic to the USSR. A good librarian is meant to say "The heck with you folks, I'm going to collect neutrally anyway" but some don't. This climate also made it harsh on publishers. Even now, books are being banned over the whole Iraq issue.
Third, there may be other factors you're not aware of. For instance, the Russian collection at my library was *decimated* by mould. I had to weed everything that was infested.
Gorman's not from the States.
I'm a small rural library duhrector, and I like to think that my little library can satisfy a good majority of the needs of my patrons. True, there are patrons who come in that need research grade materials, and I happily ILL them. If my library weren't where it is, patrons would have to travel even further to get to one that could serve its needs.
I'd also like to point out that different libraries have different constraints. Some people are anal retentive. There are fewer and fewer of those. In my library, eating responsibly is allowed. The idea is not to mess up the collection, or have giant rats roaming the library. If folks eat neatly, this is achieved. Just as I don't shush people unless someone tells me to. In fact, I tell my patrons all of the time that they can shush *me*. The idea here is that someone should be able to walk in and study in quiet if they want to. Were I to have a larger library, I would have quiet study space.
Gorman is regarded as the idiot he is in the circles I travel. He can't deal with bloggers not for the reasons he claims, but because he's often on the receiving end of everyone's ire. (Particularly library blogs.)
People as insecure as Gorman in LIS are
1) Old
2) Not well educated, but will defend the necessity of the MLS to their death
3) Not as computer literate as they ought to be
As to whoever said tear down the shelves and put up computers, have you considered DMCA?
I know a lot of stuff on our shelves might seem old, but I'd reckon that the vast majority of our collections are still within copyright.
I'd also argue that we're all trying to provide as much computer access as possible, but that it's just not possible in a lot of cases. Computers take up a LOT of space. We do want them. Space is at a premium in a lot of libraries, though, so we need to deal with what we've got. In the meantime, consider computers when you see all of those library building projects. A lot of those projects are caused by the need for more space for computers that the public rightfully demands.