[WEB4LIB] Re: Welcome to the Schoogle Era

[Amos Lakos]

Go Karen Go -
I am coming out of the shadows as well on this one:

Google Scholar is just the first new service that is designed to make
search and access to scholarly digital resources more SIMPLE.

And it is not about Libraries Only. The future is about making all
computing and information transfer and use - more simple.

Read the Oct 30, 2004 issue of the Economist for a fascinating
survey on "the conquest of complexity" - and as far as I am concerned,
librarians should welcome these developments and not feel threatened
by them - in any case they are coming - with our blessings or without.

Read - Survey: Make it simple;
The Economist. London: Oct 30, 2004.Vol.373, Iss. 8399;  pg. 4
Available full text from ABIInform....

Amos

--On Thursday, November 18, 2004 10:27 AM -0800 "K.G. Schneider" 
<kgs at bluehighways.com> wrote:

>> Imagine if Google came up with a better
>> overall funding model than hundreds of libraries
>> paying a mix of agregators who
>> pay a mix of publishers,
>> redundantly.
>> It isn't hard to imagine scenarios that
>> might easily overcome our jerry-rigged
>> method of e-resource brokering.
>> Libraries are in the middle layer of
>> something that could be made more efficient,
>> maybe by eliminating the middle.
>>
>> Mark J. Ludwig
>
> I wrote Mark off-list, but then reconsidered. I'll come out of the closet,
> as it were, on this one. I really see Mark's point. It's not just about
> Google being a huge, well-funded company with the kind of resources we in
> Libraryland will never have. LibraryLand is a feudal universe balkanized
> by both type of institution and geopolitical boundaries. We suck at
> marketing, and (ferbish proselytizing again) we suck at presenting
> content the way people wanna and SHOULD see it, the way content is meant
> to be experienced. (I heard a librarian--who had never seen a FRBR
> display--refer to FRBR as "dumbing down" the catalog, and to borrow a
> phrase from Capote, I felt "bubbles in my blood.")
>
> Google, on the other hand, is an excellent example of the unified field
> theory. Not to mention what a few bucks in the pocket can do. They are
> certainly not organizing Committees and Task Forces to present
> Resolutions. They are just doing it.
>
> It's worth asking if we should hitch a star to Google Scholar. On the
> terrific blog It's All Good, Alane suggests that this is the End Of The
> World As We Know It, and adds that she feels fine.  (I wrote the above
> paragraph before reading her reference to "the big bang," and am
> grinning.) I would feel fine if I felt that we were going to end up on
> the new world, but I worry we'll be left behind. We can and should look
> at ways that Google Scholar could help libraries crawl out of the
> primordial soup and begin to develop lungs before we join the ranks of
> the brachiopods and the dodo birds.
>
> My caution: if Google becomes the Walmart of value-added content, then it
> may also become the gatekeeper--like Walmart, deciding what cannot be
> aggregated.
>
> I tell you, it's been quite a week. I haven't felt so much in the presence
> of major change since the day I installed Mosaic and got Trumpet Winsock
> working, and for the first time saw NASA images on my computer.
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs at bluehighways.com
>
>
>
>



Amos Lakos
Librarian, Rosenfeld Management Library
UCLA - Anderson School of Management
110 Westwood Plaza, Box 951460
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1460
Phone: (310) 794-4381
Fax: (310) 825-4835
E-mail: aalakos at library.ucla.edu
Web: http://personal.anderson.ucla.edu/amos.lakos/index.html