[WEB4LIB] Re: The OPAC as Portal - Not!

[Eric Hellman]

Great comments!

At 10:48 AM -0700 10/21/99, Dale Askey wrote:
>order to generate ad revenue. One of the fundamental differences
>between a library and companies such as these is that libraries do
>not look at the bottom line when providing content. Amazon is

I assume that you don't mean that Libraries provide content without regard
to costs and benefits, but rather that they don't measure success primarily
by looking at their revenue. This is exactly the complementarity that
argues for "joining" Yahoo rather than "competing". Yahoo wouldn't be
threatened, Libraries would be threatened, and cooperative interaction
would be a boon to both.

I admit that the library-as-plugin concept is likely to lead to queasiness.
After all this is inside-out from tradition. Libraries have always been
containers; the idea that a book or magazine could contain a library rather
than vice versa used to be silly.

>Redundancy in this manner
>enriches the resource pool. No, everyone should not be doing the
>same thing, but a librarian putting together a collection of resources
>on "Black Women Writers of the 1930's" in New York will most likely
>come up with a different set than a librarian in Iowa. Both
>collections will probably be tailored to the local user population and
>this is why redundancy isn't so bad.

I like second helpings too, even when billions starve.

Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/           Tools for 21st Century Scholarly Publishing