Role of librarians

[Tony Barry]

At 11:01 PM 16/10/95, Paul Neff, Internet Librarian wrote:
>OK, just as soon as you let us know when you've finished cataloging,
>classifying and indexing all the books in the world.  If there's a fundamental
>difference between these two tasks then I'd be interested in knowing about it.

1.  Scaling difference.
    The Web encourages small documents and publishing is so cheap that far
    more will be.  I suspect the volume will be an order of magnitude
    different.  There are I think about 200,000 books published each year
    and maybe??? half a million journal articles.  The web has grown from
    about 0 to over 6 million items in 18 months and its getting bigger,
    faster.

2.  Economies of indexing
    You have the full text of web material available and computimng gets
    cheaper and cheaper.  Automated full text indexing looks more and more
    attractive compared with manual indexing on a cost basis.

3.  Need for descriptive cataloguing
    Descriptive cataloging is needed because catalogues _don't_ deliver
    information.  You need to have a detailed description to work out if
    you will justify the effort to get the book.  On the net this is not
    needed.

4.  Economics of publishing
    One of the main reasons libraries exist is because people's
    appetite to read greatly exceeds their capacity to pay.  With the net
    substantially dropping the cost of publishing and access there will be
    less need for libraries and their catalogues.

5.  Difference in the content
    Books are fixed artifcats.  What's on the net isn't.  It may be
    dynamic and even the boundaries of a document become unclear.

I'm not arguing that Librarians will not have a role just that it will be
different - and maybe not in libraries.

Tony

__________________________________________________________________________
Tony Barry                  URL:http://snazzy.anu.edu.au/People/TonyB.html
Centre for Networked Information and Publishing & also
Centre for Networked Access to Scholarly Information  fone  +61 6 249 4632
Australian National University Library                phax  +61 6 279 8120
Canberra  A.C.T. 0200, AUSTRALIA                      tony at info.anu.edu.au