ALA president Michael Gorman accuses digitisation as being a waste of money and has attacked librarians for being ‘too interested in technology’ says an article from Information World Review (issue 220, pg.7)
He was talking, of course, about the google digitisation project in particular, a project which has met with both support and hositility from a wide range of people and organisations. He claimed that there is a danger in reducing whole books down into ‘a bunch of paragraphs’ and reading information out of context. (I wonder what he makes of Amazon’s intentions to do something similar? - see my other blog entry on ‘Amazon in the Academic Library‘)
A spokesman for Google refuted his criticisms and suggested that people were turning to Google because library catalogues, even those available online, did not contain enough bibliographic information, as is quoted as saying ‘we need catalogue enrichment with links, table and abstracts and we need more sophisticated systems that are multi-lingual and intelligent’.
I have to admit I agree. More bibliographic information is becoming more important to users, particular as increasing sources of information become available to the reader. I personally would have loved it if books from my own academic library had abstracts of content, or even contents pages, available to browse in the catalogue, as much time is wasted locating and browsing through texts and books that are irrelevant. Perhaps the practicality of this is not great - imagine having to abstract every book that came into the library and every book that was already available?? I can see how this could cause problems. But in my work that is exactly what we have to do, and we add nearly 200 items to stock each week, so it does take up a considerable amount of our time. I couldn’t imagine how our library would function without this however, as it is essential for our users to be able to evaluate the content of documents/books. I’m sure there are plenty of libraries that are also already doing this, although I don’t honestly know. However, a (very) quick survey of the main university library catalogues in Scotland shows that there is only one that provides this options to students - Glasgow Caledonian University Library.
There have even been suggestions from those involved in the Library 2.0. discussions (more on this later) about including user comments, people who read this also read…., etc. just making the system more interactive for users generallly (I forget who mentioned this so I hope they will excuse this). I think that it is a mistake to rule out the possibilities that technology creates for us to improve and add to the library service, and it seems as senseless as resisting the first automation of libraries would have been…
