Role of librarians

[Nick Arnett]

>But Kay's reported suggestion totally ignores the most fundamental
>obstacle -- copyright.

The quote from him was out of context, naturally.  The Roundtable included
extensive discussion of copyright issues in relation to digital media.  It
is an issue primarily, I think, because multiple copies of a document can
be in use at the same time.  How could a publisher afford to allow a
library to do that without either an enormous one-time license (unthinkable
these days) or pay-as-you-go fees, which goes against the traditional
notion of a library.

For these reasons, I tend to think that with regard to copyrighted,
networked, digital information, the library's role becomes almost
completely that of cataloging -- and the catalogs are becoming worth much
more than the documents themselves, on the whole, I'd argue.  Ken Dowlin,
the San Francisco librarian (as well as others, I'm sure), was looking a
year ago at creating a library card that would act like a debit card --
you'd be able to spend the library's money on searches, retrievals, etc.,
on commercial sites, but just as there are limits on the number of books
you can withdraw at once, there will be limits on how much you can debit
with your free card.  Of course, the equation changes when you can pay to
use it more -- today, as far as I know, you can't pay to take out more
books than the limit... but you pay if you keep them past the time limit,
which becomes meaningless in the networked digital world.

Nick