Chicago Librarian - At the Intersection of Gott und die Welt

Current Cites for May 2010 is out! You can find the issue here...

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Opening paragraph:

Can We Afford Libraries?

The depression years have been full of irony, but they have yielded nothing more ironical than the country-wide slash in library budgets which has accompanied the equally widespread demand for library services. The public has manifestly wanted books more than at any other time in our history, even though the melancholy records of publishers and booksellers indicate that it has had little money with which to buy them. There was all the more reason for the libraries to come to the rescue, since a book can be lent at a cost which is only a small fraction of its purchase price. Improved library service would have been one of the best depression investments. [R. L. Duffus, "Our starving libraries; studies in ten American communities during the depression years", Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin co., 1933]

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The NYT OpEd "The Death of the Open Web" by Virginia Heffernan is making the rounds.

I just wish that in order to get published in the NYT, you actually had to have some insight into the subject you're talking about. I bring this up because all that's in evidence in Heffernan's piece is an assumption for some reason that the current state of affairs where companies like Apple serve as gatekeepers through their AppStores and subscription firewalls -- that this state of affairs not only will endure but will become the rule for online communication.

Of course, in order to make this assumption, you need to completely ignore what's been going on for 30 years or more. You also need to ignore what motivates people and instead assume that an environment where they're treated essentially as classic "consumers" is likely to be more successful than one where they can pretty much do whatever they want.

Of course, you can also look out the window in December and assume it'll snow all year, but doesn't entitle you to write articles on meteorology for the New York Times -- at least I thought.

Is a 'closed web' likely to become the way of the future? About as likely as companies like CompuServe and AOL making a come-back.

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Current Cites for April 2010 is out! You can find the issue here...

My stuff included the article Roy missed from last month on the Internet's 'Third Decade'. I also included an interesting, not to mention innovative, approach to digital preservation from this month's Library Hi Tech.

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A student came by as I was closing up wanting to know if we kept records of people's searches. His hard drive had crashed and all the work he had done the day before, researching for a paper, was now lost.

I explained that the only way to do this is by creating an account on the individual databases (where possible) and then saving the search results to that. Beyond that, there's little record of what people do. And that's a good thing.

(And as consolation, I did mention that it would probably be easier to do the search one more time now that he was familiar with the database and search terms.)

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