Shirky

[Julia Schult]

Did Clay Shirky even listen to (or read) Billington's
speech?!

In his final summary paragraph, he (she?) says "Digital
books will
 become ubiquitous when interfaces for digital text are
uniformly
 better than the publishing products we have today. And as
the
 Librarian of Congress shows us, there are still plenty of
institutions
 that just don't understand this, and there is still a lot
of
 innovation, and profit, to be achieved by proving them
wrong."

The first sentence is true, and does not contradict any of
what Dr. Billington said.  Mr. Shirky seems to have totally,
completely missed the Library of Congress' attempt to put
online (and digitize) non-book items for which the web is
now "uniformly better than the publishing products" that are
otherwise available for such non-book items.  The point is
the web is not now the best place to be distributing the
books that the Library of Congress has, especially since
they have many more non-book items which have no
distribution system except for those that live within blocks
of the LoC.

Finally, Mr. Shirky's last sentence is a dead giveaway.  On
his website, Mr. Shirky proclaims his goal as being to
challenge society to jump at the future rather than letting
the fuddy-duddies get in the way, as a participatory society
is better than one ruled by "vested interests".  However, as
far as I can tell, his real area is marketing. " Innovation
and Profit"?  What about learning from past mistakes and
profiting intellectually or artistically, rather than in the
pocketbook?  Shirky says about himself: "I have been a
producer,  programmer, professor,  designer, author,
consultant, sometimes  working with people who  wanted to
create a purely  intellectual or aesthetic  experience
online,  sometimes working with  people who wanted to use
the internet to sell books  or batteries or banking."
However, when you look at his bio
(http://www.shirky.com/bio.html) almost all of it is
involved with marketing in one way or another.

My tirade delivered, I should explain that Professor Shirky
has had the misfortune to hit one of my hot buttons, which
is that this so-called Information Age is really a Marketing
Age, where the development of the Net is not being driven by
quality or even real human needs, but by profit or percieved
human needs.  The library patron who gets a quick, slick
answer from AskJeeves may initially be satisfied, and will
think AJ is the bees' knees, but when they try to use that
answer in a real situation where they need accurate,
quality, not just information but understanding, they will
find themselves shortchanged.  Mr. Shirky, I challenge you
to think about how the free market (free-for-all market?)
encourages mediocrity and caters to the lowest common
denominator.  One purpose of the Library of Congress is to
preserve and make available information and history that the
"market" would just as soon forget; they are not in the
business of competing with NetLibrary or eBooks.

---Julia E. Schult
Access/Electronic Services Librarian
Elmira College
Jschult at elmira.edu