Depository Librarians Group in Facebook
Librarians from the Federal Depository Library Program are showing up in many online places. Now there is a group on Facebook for them. It's a pretty quiet group so far, but it is another forum for librarians to gather and share their experiences and maybe reach out to users in creative ways. If you work in a depository library and have a Facebook account, please consider joining. Thanks to Kathryn Mills of DePauw for taking a chance and creating this group.
And if you're not a depository librarian, but are a Facebook member interested in government information of all kinds, there's a group for you too!
Continue readingHow Do Journalists Use Government Information?
Here is a good summary of a program sponsored by GODORT and the SLA Government Information Division at the recent Federal Depository Library conference.
- How Do Journalists Use Government Information? By Peggy Garvin, Government Information Division, Special Libraries Association.
New York Times reporter Scott Shane and Washington Post research editor Alice Crites educated and entertained the crowd at a joint meeting of the SLA Government Information Division (DGI) and the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) in Arlington, VA on October 15, 2007.Continue reading
Do We Need A World Library?
Plans for a World Library were announced with great fanfare earlier this week. It's a nice idea but I have to admit, my first thought when I learned of this project was "Why?" We already have a digital library that covers the world. It's called the web. Yeah, I know the collection could use a little weeding but still, it's up and running and being added to all the time. Are grand designs and top-down planning still the way to go in a time when anyone with a laptop, a scanner, and a DVD burner (or good bandwidth) can crank out gigabytes of data? The other day I was visiting a friend and, while we sat talking in his livingroom, he burned a DVD for me containing every Black Flag album, every Sonic Youth album, every Minutemen album, and every Husker Du album ever released. It was all done in about 20 minutes. Now I'm not saying that scanning the Mabo Case Manuscripts would be as easy, and I have tons of respect for those who labor to provide access points to such things, as well as the folks who coordinate such activities. But I do worry because the methods for organization are already here, the technologies are already here, and while smart people spend time crafting carefully worded discussion papers, things are disappearing.
Continue readingThe Googlization of Everything, “Drop the fight”? or Start a Revolution?
Siva Vaidhyanathan is writing his next book, The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce, and Community--and Why We Should Worry, and will be posting snippets of text on the blog, The Googlization of Everything and asking readers for comments. He says of the book:
The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google's ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?
Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, a fellow at the Institute for the Future of the Book, and the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs and The Anarchist in the Library.
"Drop the fight"?
To those of us at FGI, the increasing reliance by libraries on Google is something that needs close scrutiny. I was dismayed to read recently that an associate dean for public services and collection development said, that because Google does the "search function" "better than so far any library can do" therefore "..what would be in our best interests is to drop the fight, to let Google take over that..." (Susan Gibbons quoted in Young Librarians, Talkin' 'Bout Their Generation by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19, 2007). To say that finding information can be done only one way and the (apparently) winner-take-all popularity-contest and keyword-in-text approaches used by google are so good that libraries should "drop the fight" is just plain short-sighted and an abrogation of our responsibility (IMHO). For a different point of view, see On Google's Monetization of Libraries, By Rory Litwin, Library Juice 7:26 (December 17, 2004).