ChuckB writes; “The Guardian has a good column by its editor, Victor Keegan, on the emerging interaction of blogging and traditional media. Here’s a snippet:
In fact, bloggers are often people very expert in their own fields who attract other experts when issues in their domain are newsworthy. Stories in old media can be fact-checked instantaneously and the journalists and their newspapers held to account.
Seems like there is a role for librarians somewhere in this. See also Blake’s journal entry and the story posted earlier today by Rochelle for further interesting thoughts.’
Same ol’, same ol’
The problem is not that the mayor of Phoenix is nutty so much as short-sighted. As usual, nobody has made any effort to define exactly what constitutes pornography (or at least it wasn’t reported if they had). And because of that, in part, his statement that libraries don’t collect porn is a bare-faced misapprehension. Here’s a list of almost 1,500 titles, many of which are in mainstream libraries and have been considered as “porn” by other twits equally as short-sighted.
And I agree completely with the web logger who pointed out that the internet is not a discrete entity. I said as much myself in my commentary Filtering’s Not Collection Development. Each site on the ‘net constitutes the equivalent of an individual book, but if you’re going to let the internet in, you’ve got to take the whole thing or none of it. You can go into any physical library and leave books on the shelf; if you pick up the wrong one by mistake, you can put it back on the shelf and walk away. That just isn’t good enough for some people.
(The analogy fails, of course, because cyberspace is really simply an extension of the physical world; I doubt that there’s anything on the internet that you can’t get in hard copy.)