Packard Bell commercial (not a stumper)

[Marc Salomon]

remelt at LEGACY.CALVIN.EDU wrote:
|So, what are we going to do about it? Rant and rave and get offended?
|Or, seize every opportunity to show the public and the funding
|agencies that we are, and will remain, a major player in the
|information future.

Pop the hype balloon, that's what.  Libraries will be a player, but the role
they will play is yet to be determined.  As daunting as the technological
hurdles may be, the main challenges are political and economic.

>The library is depicted as a dark, menacing place full of dusty books with
>spiders in them, lorded over by red-jacketed, skinhead storm troopers marching
>in a rectangle and uttering, "Shhh", in machine-like rhythm.

Most new libraries are anything but like this stereotype.  In SF, for example,
they managed to leave so many light shafts in the New Main that there's not
enough room for the books.

>Then the scene shifts to a sunny, bucolic landscape with a cute cottage where
>life is cheery and pleasant, where information can be accessed via home
>computer.

Bucolic but for the power and phone lines.

In SF, the president of the library commission is a vice president for Pacific
Bell, the local phone company, and Pacific Telesis, their networking arm that
wants to sell both connectivity and content.  Ken Dowlin, the City Librarian,
is an ex-marine (who is running for president of ALA, beware, btw) who wants to
pipe content into your home, not for free but for a fee.  Together, these two
think that we're on the brink of building a least common denominator digital
collection advanced and complete enough to obsolete books.

This crowd is driven by the notion that (get this) digital collections will be
less expensive to maintain than traditional collections!

>From my perspective as a software engineer (liberal arts graduate) who creates
high-quality, academic digital content, it is clear that we will not see the
digitization of any substantial chunk of existing scholarly text in our
lifetimes--at least not enough to justify the elimination of the book and its
support systems.

Further, while entertainment, business and some fast-moving science and
technology disciplines are overrepresented in digital content, many, such as
liberal arts and humanities can't hope to garner the money required to fund a
digitization effort, probably because they pose and try to answer the incorrect
questions.

There is no intellectual justification for the demonization of books and
libraries--to the contrary, there are ample arguments against consigning our
intellectial heritage to the byte at any time in the forseeable future.  The
main forces arrayed against the book and "library as public space" tradition
are the same ones who have sold us media formats such as the 8 track and
casette tapes and expect us to purchase the same thing over and over again in
the shiny new format d'jour.

Too cheap to meter.  CD's never scratch.  Equal access for all...will we ever
learn?

The book is a powerful idiom that has outlasted most every contemporaneous
technological form.  The Library is all the more important as a public
intellectual archive in a time when history is for all intents and purposes
irrelavent, and as a public space when privatization and profit are the yang
and yang of the state religion's mantra.

-marc

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