

Are Librarians Totally Obsolete?
Feb 01, 2007
Commentary by Stephen Downes

Another one of those articles that leaps to the defense of librarians. It's just not convincing. Many of the arguments are of the "we won't let you" variety - the author points out that not all books are digitized, that online collections require registration, that Google's book search doesn't work, and the like. These, though, are artificial barriers, created by publishers. Librarians - some, at least - collude with the publishers because they think it will keep libraries relevant. It won't. At the first hint that librarians will no longer provide free labour (indexing, sorting, enforcing accessrestrictions) for publishers, they will be disintermediated. Why do you think Blackboard signs deals with publishers? No, librarians, if they want to remain relevant, need to curate digital archives and manage e-print repositiories. There is the idea of a library as a big collection of books and journals you bought from publishers to make available to your staff and students. Many librarians cling to that idea. They shouldn't. It's over. Total: 1987
[Direct Link] 38279
Comments

Re: Are Librarians Totally Obsolete?

Stephen Abrams, former President of the Canadian Library Association, is valiantly trying to promote the opposite with his blog and speeches:
stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix dot com [Comment] [Permalink]



Your Comment

You can preview your comment and continue editing until you are satisfied with it. Comment will not be posted on the until you have clicked 'Done'.



Enter email to receive replies:

Your comments always remain your property, but in posting them here you agree to license under the same terms as this site CC By-NC-SA. If your comment is offensive it will be deleted.

Automated Spam-checking is in effect. If you are a registered user you may submit links and other HTML. Anonymous users cannot post links and will have their contents screened - certain words are prohibited and comments will be analyzed to make sure they make sense.
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=38279
www.downes.ca
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-41
19791
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MRR4RVAHQV6DPHYRCIEPOFBZYJLLFCIM
<urn:uuid:61e823e3-30a0-4bbf-a53e-fdc6d362527f>
2014-09-17T03:31:08Z
174.132.255.250
sha1:UDZNQPVPIR4BKXIU7DFVT6GCHH5BQ72Z
<urn:uuid:e5440619-6e9c-4f4a-bf2d-f73c6bd4f03f>
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=38279
length
response
<urn:uuid:acfd4890-ba58-4577-858c-21bd815e253c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-196-40-205.us-west-1.compute.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-41
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for September 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf