Why Librarians are not Amazonians

Bibliofuture writes “David Rothman has a website Teleread that promotes a national digital text archive for public use. In a commentary at his blog he comments on why librarians have not already done what Amazon is doing. He points to an article he wrote that suggested some equivalent ideas to librarians. His comments are worth a look. Also the Teleread site is interesting from a librarians perspective.”

October 31, 2003 by Uncategorized 6

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6 Responses

  1. Bibliofuture says:
    October 31, 2003 at 1:38 am

    Teleread
    You should take a look at the Teleread blog comments to see whether you question the statements in the comment that “The more I deal with librarians, the more I see them as preservers of the status quo” and “librarians are deniers”

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  2. David Rothman says:
    October 31, 2003 at 11:29 am

    Re:Teleread
    I hope librarians will take my TeleRead commentary in the right way. Librarians have innovators in their midst, such as Jenny Levine, but, yes, this does seem to be a rather conservative, cautious profession on the whole. (I’m talking about defense of the professional status quo, as opposed to the political one for the general population.) Actually I’m conservative myself in the sense of wanting public libraries to survive. I don’t want to see the bookstore model kill off the Carnegie model. I’ll welcome ideas from librarians as to how to educate the profession on the need to take the initiative rather than letting Amazon always lead the way. John Iliff, at the time a reference librarian in Pineallas Park near Tampa, wrote TeleRead Update 15, and I’d heartily recommend that people drop by for a look. I hope that other librarians can follow John’s courageous example and speak up! Meanwhile thanks to Bibliofuture for the pointer to the commentary! – David Rothman – [email protected] / 703-370-6540

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  3. Anonymous Patron says:
    November 1, 2003 at 4:18 am

    I agree wholeheartedly with the blog
    If you read the blog entry, the comments sound much less inflammatory. I recently used Amazon to find sources for a topic, and the reviews made it *much* more useful to me than any OPAC I’ve seen. I’m a library school student who wants to support libraries, but if corporations continue to provide new capabilities while librarians respond by saying that technology will never replace traditional librarianship, guess what, the public will move on. Another example of retrograde thinking might be when catalogers deny that metadata can replace traditional cataloging. Sorry to ruffle any feathers, but I will rejoice when the kind of obsessiveness embodied in AACR2 becomes obsolete.

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  4. cdnlibrarian says:
    November 1, 2003 at 9:46 pm

    By definition…
    any profession that has as part of its mandate the preservation of information is going to be (in the larger sense of the word) conservative. You can’t afford to jump at every new technology if you want information to remain accessible as long as possible. (See: the BBC’s Domesday Book, etc etc.)

    That said,of course many librarians *are* interested in pushing the envelope, and that’s a good thing. But I don’t see why the instinct to try to preserve some of the good things about an analog world in a digital one should be decried.

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  5. David Rothman says:
    November 2, 2003 at 6:46 am

    Re:By definition…
    I love your example of the Domesday Book. Talk about the need for a coordinated, TeleRead-style approach–with due attention paid to grubby details such as the popularization of a Universal Consumer Format. Outfits like Content Reserve plain don’t care. They just see libraries as future cash cows. Got any problems with teaming up with Amazon to try to get the Proprietary Format Promoters’ Forum to live up to an old promise, so that in the future we don’t have Domesday Book scenarios? Needless to say, a coordinated and truly system-oriented approach in the TeleRead vein could also address other issues such as regular monitoring of media integrity and the reliable performance of backups. This could work to the advantage of libraries and Amazon alike. People will be more likely to buy e-books if they can trust the electronic approach. It’s a gamble right now unless you stick to something basic like ASCII. I’ve been an e-book advocate for 12 years now but have yet to buy a book in an encrypted proprietary format. Sure wish libraries felt the same. That would be in keeping with the preservationist tendencies of the profession.

    Of course, I know some librarians would still cry, “Paper, paper, paper–we need to stick to it.” But with young people so screen-oriented, librarians can’t go back to the past if they want pubic libraries and the Carnegie tradition to survive. The most conservative thing would be to embrace e-books and other new media–thereby keeping public libraries relevant–while at the same time holding them up to the archival standards for paper books.

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  6. Bibliofuture says:
    November 5, 2003 at 10:55 am

    Re:By definition…
    Librarians should not subject themselves to the “tyranny of the or”. Either we preserve OR we use the advancing technologies. Why not just do both.

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