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January 24, 2007

Just what are we doing?

Our colleague from Champaign, Bernie Sloan, posted two interesting articles on a list that I belong to. They are very thought provoking and so good I would like to share them with you. The first is an article by Jonathan Ree which appears in the February 2007 issue of the British magazine Prospect. Unfortunately, the complete article is only available to subscribers or I think through Newsbank. Anyway here it is…

February 2007 | 131 » Essays » The library of Google
The Google search engine is making many of the world’s great libraries available online. Is this an advance for scholarship, or, as a French librarian argues, a victory for Anglo-Saxon bias and trivialisation?

Jonathan Rée

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Jonathan Rée is a freelance historian and philosopher
On the whole I am not an addictive type, but I must admit to a weakness for libraries. My unconscious mind, lethargic about many things, is always primed with pretexts for a visit to the Bodleian, or a great overseas library, or some quirky special collection. It can always conjure up an urgent need to look at a book that has probably not been opened for 200 years, or to see what some classic text looked like before modern editors took it into their heads to modernise its spelling and punctuation, and perhaps its meaning too. I know that my library habit is unlikely to add more than a particle to the total store of human knowledge, but that takes nothing away from my delight in capturing some fugitive fact, correcting someone’s misquotation, or lighting upon a marginal scrawl that has been transformed, by the passage of time, from an act of literary vandalism into a poignant message from a reader now lost to the world.

The smell of old bindings and the sound and texture of dry paper can of course enhance the pleasures of a session in a library, but after browsing in the lush digital pastures of Early American Newspapers, … (the rest is restricted to subscribers but here is the link)

The second article appears in the January 23, 2007 issue of Wired Campus, an e-newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education
January 23, 2007
Wanted: Librarian. Book Lovers Need Not Apply.

As more and more librarians become “media specialists” or “information technologists,” what happens to librarians who remain chiefly interested in collecting books, not in promoting information literacy? They get a bit jaundiced, writes Thomas Washington, the librarian at a school in the Washington area.

In an editorial for The Washington Post, Mr. Washington bristles at the notion that libraries should be helping students navigate “the digital forest of information overload” instead of getting people to the stacks:

The buzzword in the trade is “information literacy,” a misnomer, because what it is really about is mastering computer skills, not promoting a love of reading and books. These days, librarians measure the quality of returns in data-mining stints. We teach students how to maximize a database search, about successful retrieval rates. What usually gets lost in the scramble is a careful reading of the material. … More

posted by Anna at 10:53 am |

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