Search Engines points us to Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries, a neat article by Norbert Lossau in D-lib.
“With the development of the World Wide Web, the “information search” has grown to be a significant business sector of a global, competitive and commercial market. Powerful players have entered this market, such as commercial internet search engines, information portals, multinational publishers and online content integrators. Will Google, Yahoo or Microsoft be the only portals to global knowledge in 2010? If libraries do not want to become marginalized in a key area of their traditional services, they need to acknowledge the challenges that come with the globalisation of scholarly information, the existence and further growth of the academic internet”
Revisit this analogous poll from earlier in the year on the Digitization of Libraries.
Libraries marginalized to extinction!
Libraries are increasingly becoming marginalized due to the internet and digitization of information, and libraries’ inability to modernize its dinosaur-practices and adapt these technologies and modernize. If we don’t modernise and adapt then we are surely going to become extinct like the dinosaurs. Is the library industry happy to just survive and struggle on continuing budget cuts? Are librarians happy to have a stagnant industry and stagnant wages? But we know within our hearts without a doubt that we serve an important function in society, but we don’t seem to be appreciated or recognised enough, and this lack of appreciation/recognition is reflection in our poor wages. What are we doing wrong? How much could a secretary ask for in wages if he or she was still using a typewriter and did not know how to use Microsoft Word, for example? Would he/she be hired in the first place? Similarly, libraries have to keep up with the modern times and upgrade it skills base and not use outdated methods that are no longer applicable such as MARC and AACR2 and use IT standards that can deliver multimedia and multi-languages simultaneously. Libraries don’t exist in a vaccum, and library standards are not the only standards that libraries can use. And standards need to be upgraded, and sometimes replaced. I read somewhere that libraries devote 90% of their energies on backroom operations and 10% on customers. We have to reverse this statistics if libraries are to survive because our customers don’t care much about our backroom operations. If these backroom operations and libary standards were so important, then how come two libraries running two different library systems can’t easily exchange data that is stored within these system without expensive and time-consuming data-conversion routines? This is because library standards are largely vendor-based i.e. proprietary standards, which is contradictory in terms. Library standards have to be user-based, not vendor-based. Only then can we make improvements and move forward.