One of my disappointments in missing the Spring 2006 Depository Library Council meeting was missing the opportunity to hear Dr. Joseph Janes, who I was privileged to hear at the 2005 Alaska Library Association conference in Barrow Alaska.
Dr. Janes’ remarks are not recorded in the official proceedings from the Government Printing Office (GPO), but I had the chance to review an attendee’s notes from the speech. In those notes, I noticed three points worth highlighting here, keeping in mind that he might not have put them exactly this way because the following are notes taken from notes of Dr. Janes’ speech:
- Mediation is still needed because there is a lot of stuff out there (‘net and other places) and some of it is still hard to find despite search engines.
- People need stuff in accessible and usuable formats.
- It is important to build tools that help people w/o direct intervention, like pathfinders, easily understood names and links to services.
I think these points are well made and should be taken to heart by every library that provides services to government information. GPO and federal agencies should pay special attention to the second point before simply dumping information into a digital format. Many times digital will be a good choice, but not always.
Given that Dr. Janes had an hour and half to work with, he must have had many other helpful insights. Can someone reading this blog leave some comments about other things that Joe Janes said? Or tell me that the points above weren’t what he had to say? Thanks!
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Dr. Janes was a marvelously entertaining speaker with a lot of good things to say. I have posted a summary of his remarks for the benefit of librarians in my area who could not attend the conference:
http://library.stmarytx.edu/acadlib/doc/sa/fdlcs/s06bnw.htm
An index to my complete “coverage” of the conference is at:
http://library.stmarytx.edu/acadlib/doc/sa/fdlcs/april06.htm
Hi Kathy,
Thanks very much for stopping by and pointing us to your coverage of Joe Janes and DLC. I look forward to reading through it in the next few days!
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“And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them.” — Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.