[WEB4LIB] Re: Library of the future

[David Merchant]

Even the hand-held e-book, light and back-lit with a built-in dictionary
and speech synthesizer is not a library.  There are hundreds of thousands
of books published around the world every year, there are millions of
volumes in many average sized academic library, how does one find the book
they need?  They ask a librarian.  They will still need a librarian to help
them with boolean searching, with narrowing their subject, determining
where to begin a particular search, and other things that may seem easy to
us but the average Jane and Joe Q. Public don't find easy.  And, people are
lazy by nature, and even a research, handbook, reference e-book that they
can download, they'd rather have a librarian show them how to get the info
they are searching for, how to use this or that book, where to go for added
sources, or a quick answer to something that would be easier and quicker to
ask a librarian to help them find the answer than to find the book and
download it and find the info by themselves.  Librarians are not just
keepers of books, we help people find information: it's just that for the
longest time most of the information was transmitted via the medium of
paper.  

And many people resist change.  As with the web browsers: at first people
quickly changed to the new versions when they came out, but as the new
versions kept coming and coming, and the interfaces and features kept
evolving and changing, the rate of people changing to a newer version of
any web browser is slowing.  For quite some time many people will prefer,
even trust, the ink-printed written word over the electronic written word.

And some of us like to write on our personally owned books: some I write
notes, comments, in the margins, and I like it that way thank you very
much.  Even if they then come out with one that I can e-write on, why pay
the money for something that needs electricity when I can have a paper book
do the same dang thing?  Yes it has it's own built-in back-lighting, and
that would be very nice at times, but with a paper book things are simplier
and at times I rather have the simpler way of doing the same thing: I don't
have to lug around the equipment to connect it to an outlet, or worry about
different currents in different parts of the world, or searching for a
battery when the battery dies, and paying out money over and over again
(even if pocket change worth) to keep the e-book going (replacing
batteries, connecting it to an outlet) when it costs me even less to keep
the paper book going.  

Just my 3 cents of rambling.

TTFN,
David






Systems Librarian, Louisiana Tech University
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