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The internet, Google, libraries
Thanks to my fellow blogger for the link to Fister's article. I recently came across an article (linked through that splendid online publication brought to us by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts and Letters Daily) that offers more food for thought. Titled Better than Free,this thoughtful piece by Kevin Kelly of Wired discusses how we might be able to add value to the vast amount of free information now available - value that people will be willing to pay for. He says that "The internet is a copy machine....When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can't be copied?" He discusses eight "generative values" that are better than free:
immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability. All of these are relevant to librarians as we adjust our skill sets to provide information available on the internet.
Cataloging the Creative Commons
Michael Sauers, who has the wonderful title of "Technology Innovation Librarian" and blogs for the Nebraska Library Commission, has started cataloging and offering Creative Commons-licensed works at his library. What he did was to take electronic versions of CC titles, post them on his library's Web server, catalog them in the OPAC, and make them available to the public. Additionally, for titles whose license allows for physical printing of the works, they turned the electronic books into spiral-bound books to be added to the physical collection. The result, so far, is that his library now has a collection of 9 CC-licensed electronic titles available through the OPAC along with 7 print versions available to circulate. Also, seven of the nine titles resulted in brand new records in OCLC. Corey Doctorow, one of the authors, has blogged about the project over at BoingBoing.
Continue readingSo Long, It’s Been Good to Know You
This is my final post as guest blogger on FGI. I've really enjoyed this gig and I want to thank FGI for invting me. This is also probably the last time I'll be contributing to public discussions as a librarian. Last week I learned that my position is being abolished. The budget was tight, they needed to cut, and my position was selected.
So indulge me a moment as I stroll down memory lane.
My first library job was at the Steenbock Agricultural Library at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. This is where I first mastered the intricacies of gov docs.
After college I moved to Chicago, where I got a job at the John Marshall Law School library, still filing government documents but now expanding my repertoire to include serials checkin (on a kardex, remember those?) and looseleaf updates.
After Chicago I moved to Los Angeles where I got a job at the RAND Corporation library in Santa Monica, doing serials checkin again, as well as acquisitions and copy cataloging. One year they gave us all PCs and a few months later Migell Acosta loaded a Mosaic browser on my machine. Things have never been the same since.
A few years later I got my MLIS from UCLA. I was no longer a "paraprofessional"...
I moved to D.C. and hopped around a bunch of library jobs (including one that took me to all the Marine Corps base libraries on the East Coast- Semper Fi!) until I arrived at the IMF where I took a job as librarian in 2000. I did systems librarian work mostly, then got into training and that pretty much brings me to today.
So that's it. While I never say never, it's most likely that my career as a librarian is over.
See you on the dark side of the moon.
Continue readingUniversity Libraries Create Great Resource
One of things that libraries bring to the world of government information is the ability to take preexisting materials, make them user-friendly and offer them to the world at large for no charge. This is particularly true in the world of public domain federal government information, at least when it comes to digitizing.
A project I'd like to highlight today is a searchable version of the Foreign Relations of the United States done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries.
For those not familar, here is a description of Foreign Relations of the United States from the State Department:
The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, which is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 350 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies.
Foreign Relations volumes contain documents from Presidential libraries, Departments of State and Defense, National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency, Agency for International Development, and other foreign affairs agencies as well as the private papers of individuals involved in formulating U.S. foreign policy. In general, the editors choose documentation that illuminates policy formulation and major aspects and repercussions of its execution. Volumes published over the past few years have expanded the scope of the series in two important ways: first by including documents from a wider range of government agencies, particularly those involved with intelligence activity and covert actions, and second by including transcripts prepared from Presidential tape recordings.
In short, it's a good place to get declassifed materials and context for most US foreign policy decisions. The two University libraries and Federal Depository Library Program members digitized the paper volumes so that the text would be searchable, but researchers can see the actual pages of reproduced telegrams and the like.
I think this resource will be of great value to researchers. When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a senior paper on Turkey's accession to NATO. I wound up having to use FRUS a lot because that's where NATO meetings got recorded in the 1940s and 1950s, not as you'd expect in NATO publications. I remember checking out a dozen volumes at a time, stacking them on my apartment floor and carefully going through the index for "Turkey" and looking up pages and bookmarking them for later xeroxing. How I wished I had this product then. If made widely known, it could help people better understand historical foreign policy and contribute to today's policy debates.
A private company could have done this. But then it would be a subscription product and the average citizen or undergrad student couldn't be bothered with it. Now our declassified foreign policy heritage, both good and bad is out there for the whole world to see. And that's a good thing. Now if the CIA would stop trying to block new releases.
Is there some product at your library that you can add value to and show the world? Tell us!
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Tough Government Documents Make Librarians Tougher
A coworker tipped me off to a law-lib posting by Brent Johnson about a panel at the American Association of Law Librarians annual meeting that sounds like it was a riot: GD-SIS Program: Tough Librarians Rise to the Challenge with Tough Government Documents Andrew P. Evans gave a talk on Combative and Military Government Documents that offered these citizen benefits to reading military docs:
- The military’s ability to evolve combat techniques.
- Real world application
- Gun and knife safety.
- Question the techniques- it’s your civic duty
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