 sj |
||
|
||
BS: If it was up to you...
|
|
|
Subject: BS: If it was up to you... From: 282RA Date: 12 Jun 06 - 01:49 PM I think this may have been done already but let's wing it and see if it flies. A while ago, while discussing Ann Coulter's books, a small debate arose as to whether libraries should stock them. I felt a library should but someone else said no library should be made to stock her books. I didn't mean to say they should be made to. I just felt they should be allowed to if they want to. With that said, suppose you were starting a public library and you were the sole owner and all decisions were yours alone. What books would you stock and what would you not? Be as detailed as you wish. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Clinton Hammond Date: 12 Jun 06 - 01:52 PM "What books would you stock" All of them..... (Space permitting) Let people decide what they want to read and what they don't want to read..... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Wesley S Date: 12 Jun 06 - 02:04 PM I would think that space would not be the real problem. It's money. If you've got the money to but all the books the space will appear too. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Little Hawk Date: 12 Jun 06 - 02:15 PM Well, I guess it would be a process of general selection...one can't have ALL the books...just not possible. One would start with what seemed most obvious to have, and work from there. Regarding Coulter's books? Shrug. No real opinion about it. I don't like what she has to say, but it doesn't really matter that much to me. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Clinton Hammond Date: 12 Jun 06 - 02:19 PM "one can't have ALL the books...just not possible" It becomes way more probable if you're willing to have them electronically.... Saves on space and paper too! Heh |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 12 Jun 06 - 02:35 PM Speaking as a library director: It's a matter of money: money for materials, money for shelving, money for cataloging, money for staffing, money for building. I'd work with a library vendor such as Baker & Taylor or Ingram and purchase an opening day collection that was selected in accordance with the library's Selection Policy. That way you can get the best discount and possibly even get the stuff cataloged and processed before it arrives. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: GUEST,Desdemona Date: 12 Jun 06 - 02:48 PM There was an interesting article by Kevin Kelley in the NY Times magazine a few weeks back, discussing what looks like the inevitable digitization of books in the future. In short, it looks like eventually there *will* be room for "all of the books", at least in electronic form. I'm personally for making as much information, as many opinions, etc., available as possible, in whatever forum. As Voltaire may or may not have famously and rather too-oft-quoted-ly put it: "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." Anyway, you can read the article here if you like (sorry I don't know how to make a blue clicky; cut & paste away!): http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?ei=5090&en=c07443d368771bb8&ex=1305259200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Clinton Hammond Date: 12 Jun 06 - 03:10 PM "the inevitable digitization of books" We can hope.... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Little Hawk Date: 12 Jun 06 - 03:15 PM As I have pointed out before, most people are unwilling to defend someone else's right to say something beyond...oh...experiencing minor inconvenience to themselves? Defend it to the death? Ha! ;-) It's their own right to say things that people are willing to defend to the death. For instance, I will defend Clinton's right to say various rude and intemperate things as far as minor inconvenience to myself. On second thought, forget it! I wouldn't even bother to go that far. He's on his own as are as I'm concerned. Heh! |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Peace Date: 12 Jun 06 - 03:20 PM The University of Alberta had difficulty years back over a book entitled "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century". It had been on the regular shelves, but both copies were destroyed. (For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it was a bunch of trumped-up crap denying that the Holocaust ever happened.) Finally, the U of A purchased two others and put them in Special Collections. It is difficult to refute what hate-mongers say if ya can't read their material. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Scoville Date: 12 Jun 06 - 03:28 PM I'm sure we'll hear from a lot of full-fledged librarians about this. I'm a library student/employee, at least. I'm with Peace but in more general terms, you can't disagree with what you don't know about/don't understand. Assuming I wasn't running a subject-specific library (for instance, I work in a medical school library. We don't have much use for Coulter's work regardless of whether or not we agree with it because she's not a medical writer.), the ideal is that we stock some of everything. We're not supposed to be censors. In a fantasyland of unlimited space and funds, I would probably stock it. Sandwiched between Al Franken and Molly Invins, of course (just kidding). Digitization isn't perfect, either. You still have to have enough computers to give enough people access if they cannot download it to their home computers/don't have home computers, and a lot of digital material comes with rather heavy licensing fees. It doesn't require the storage, of course, but the initial cost and renewals can be almost as much as print. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Little Hawk Date: 12 Jun 06 - 03:36 PM Digitization is fine, but nothing beats a real book. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Clinton Hammond Date: 12 Jun 06 - 03:44 PM In 200 years or so, where there are no 'real' books left, no one will miss them |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rasener Date: 12 Jun 06 - 03:45 PM We order all our books on the Internet and the library ring us when they arrive. It is an excellent service. Saves the library stocking up. I am talking about the UK |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Peace Date: 12 Jun 06 - 03:58 PM The notion of there being no hard copies of books is scary. "Fahrenheit 451" without the fire. It too easily opens up the possibility of tampering (that happens with printed books at times), and the internet could easily become a 'controlled medium'. I agree that having the encyclopaedia or "Collected Works of Shakespeare" on a flash drive is handy and certainly more portable. But then, I wonder how easy it would have been to burn all books if all it took to do that was completely crash the internet. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Sorcha Date: 12 Jun 06 - 04:21 PM Bless MY librarian....she wants to buy them all. Flatly refuses to censor or allow her personal opinions to enter into it. My opinion exactly. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 12 Jun 06 - 04:22 PM Ah... I recommend to you Wade Roush's "The Infinite Library". Book digitization is hardly new (somebody else can make the links): The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library – includes over 70,000 texts, 2,000 of which can be downloaded to PDAs http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ The Making of America – a rich collection of 19th century books and journals from the University of Michigan http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/ The Million Books Project – an international library partnership with the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/millionbooks The Online Books Page – a useful catalog of books online http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ Project Gutenberg – the oldest book digitization project collecting simple (and sometimes inaccurate) text files typed by volunteers. http://www.gutenberg.org/ and those are just the non-profit ones. You might also be interested in Kevin Kelly's article in the New York Times Magazine (you have to register, but it's free). There are SERIOUS problems with digitizing all the world's books. Don't look for it to be completed in your lifetime, especially if you're over 40. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Clinton Hammond Date: 12 Jun 06 - 04:25 PM "completely crash the internet" You say that like it'd be easy to do...... "Don't look for it to be completed in your lifetime" I'd be surprised if it happened even in the 200 years that I mentioned above.... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Sorcha Date: 12 Jun 06 - 04:35 PM Well, I don't WANT to sit at the computer and read books. Would rather curl up in a comfy chair and turn pages. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Clinton Hammond Date: 12 Jun 06 - 04:36 PM By the time all the books are digitized, hand-held readers will be VERY common.... Also by the time all the books are digitized, it won't matter to you Sorcha! LOL |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: GUEST,Desdemona Date: 12 Jun 06 - 05:08 PM LH, I was only meaning to say that VOLTAIRE was willing to defend to the death your right to say whatever you want...;~) Personally, I have to say that I don't see that "real" (ie, bound, printed, paper) books and the digitalized versions thereof have to be mutually exclusive. As a self-confessed perpetual student, I would be loathe to have to buy, or even seek out in a library, all the texts I need in order to read all the stuff I need to. Even taking into account the occasional 80 page online primary source (some of which I'll admit to printing so that I can read them in bed like a "real" book, still way cheaper), electronic texts are an enormous boon to the reader. Being a person old enough to recall what it was like to wade throught the stacks, or resort to ILL, in search of a specific article that can now be located with a few keystrokes, I'm a believer! That said, I *don't* believe that these useful resources will ever truly replace the pleasure to be found in a nicely bound edition received (or indeed given) as a gift, or a beaten-up paperback read while sitting in the back yard with your feet in the kids' wading pool, or a lazy Sunday afternoon on the sofa with the newspaper spread out all over the room. It's a wonderful, ever-expanding world for readers, and I have no doubt that there's room in it for ALL kinds of reading matter. ~D |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: JohnInKansas Date: 12 Jun 06 - 06:34 PM The Wade Roush Infinite Library article linked by Rapaire above is one that I recall elicited a fair amount of comment at the time of it's publication, with at least a few people predicting some serious problems with copyright and other proprietary attitudes toward published materials. A few news blurbs have indicated that "all is not well" with the Google project; but it seems to have sort of disappeared from view. Does anyone have any recent input on what, and perhaps how well, the Goog is doing with it? All I've seen lately is from the "it'll never work" crowd. John |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Little Hawk Date: 12 Jun 06 - 06:42 PM In 200 years no one will miss you either, Clinton. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Peace Date: 12 Jun 06 - 06:58 PM I'll miss him. Shutting down the 'net? Easy enough I'd think. Easier than burning all the books, anyway. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 12 Jun 06 - 07:04 PM Burn all the books? What are you, a global warmer?? I'm looking for an article I read which gave estimates of the time it would take (including predictable technology advances) to digitize the Library of Congress. I think that the New York Public alone was something like 325 years, and LC is much bigger. And as I've noted before, reading a computer screen while in the bathtub is not a good idea -- especially if you drop it. And when camping out in the REAL boonies, a book can serve as tinder to light a fire or wipe for, well, your bodily functions (try doing THAT with a computer!). |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Peace Date: 12 Jun 06 - 07:11 PM I'll give it a go, Rapaire. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Peace Date: 12 Jun 06 - 07:26 PM The keyboard is hard on the arse. Watch for the Esc button. It's a killer. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 12 Jun 06 - 07:50 PM Da da da, "If I ruled the World"... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: 282RA Date: 12 Jun 06 - 08:06 PM While I think it is certainly a good idea to have all printed matter stored electronically, the hardcopies are every bit as important. First of all, nobody is going to sit there and read "Leviathan" on a monitor screen. I prefer to sit back or lay down when I read. I always read before going to sleep--anything, doesn't much matter. I have a wide variety of books all around my bed for just such a purpose. When I go out somewhere for lunch during work, I always have a book or at least a magazine with me. Also, I like to spring back and forth through pages with most of the stuff I read and that's just utterly tedious scrolling up and down. I also like to read, say, a book on the history of Gnosticism and have the Nag Hammadi library in paperback right there for reference and I switch back and forth freely which is, again, tedious to do with a computer. Otoh, digitization is fantastically good for doing searches. I cannot describe my gratitude to have that feature available to me now. Searches that would have been far too tedious and time-consuming to bother with before have often caused good information to be lost because I couldn't chase down every reference. Digitization can make a global search of a text several hundred pages long in a matter of seconds. In fact, you can perform searches no one has ever performed before on any text or document. That's quite amazing. Plus you can carry literally thousands of pages with you on a memory stick and print portions of it somewhere if need be. But I was talking more about regular books and a normal sized community library with a few thousand books. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 12 Jun 06 - 09:44 PM Several thousand books? We're a town of about 52,000 and the library has 160,000 or so items and should have more. I hope to increase the materials budget next fiscal year by at least USD 20K, bringing it up to about USD 160,000. And if I can do the same thing in FY2008, we'll be back to where we were in FY2003. Anyone out there want to spend, oh, say, USD 150,000 on books and things? |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: 282RA Date: 12 Jun 06 - 09:59 PM >>We're a town of about 52,000 and the library has 160,000 or so items and should have more.<< Okay. That will be our standard then. You can have 160,000 books in your library. What do you stock it with? |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: GUEST,pattyClink Date: 12 Jun 06 - 10:00 PM What do yiz think of public libraries which stock literally a dozen of a 'hot' nonfiction book. Ours are filling up with them. 12 of the Grisham, 6 of the (shudder) Sandra Brown, 6 of the Jude Devereaux, etc. ad nauseum. Doesn't a librarian have some duty to spend limited funds on more enduring, informative, or uplifting stuff? I can see having a copy or two of the best-sellers, but really, if somebody's GOT to have the thing the week it comes out,hey--it's a best seller, they can jolly well find it in the bookstore! |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 12 Jun 06 - 10:20 PM Well, Patty, you've mentioned three novelists. That's fiction. And we'll buy enough copies to meet demand of either fiction or nonfiction. Our rule of thumb is 5 reserves (holds) on a title equals once copy to purchase, so if there are 60 reserves we'll buy a dozen copies. Now...we temper this rule of thumb with some intelligence, too. For example, if the same person reserves the book a dozen times (and that happens!), we're only going to count that as one copy, not 2.5. And yes, we do look at the names of those reserves things for just that reason. (We don't care what you read. In fact, if we do look at who has a particular book on reserve or even checked out it's for a particular purpose and believe me, we forget about it as soon as that purpose ends. Besides, we've got a lot more to do than check up on what you're reading. Frankly folks, your reading habits are just plain boring -- and it would be against state law to reveal or discuss what you read anyway. 99% of the library's patrons are nice folks, but I ain't goin' to jail for ya.) Actually, there are bibliographies of recommended books. Things like Public Library Catalog and Fiction Catalog and Reference Books for Small and Medium-Sized Public Library (to which I have contributed a small share in the past) and Children's Catalog and many others. These do not espouse a particular view or anything else -- go to your local public library and look at them -- they're probably reference, so ask at the Reference Desk. You can easily spend $160,000 in no time flat...and that's just on books. Remember, there are also DVDs, VHS tapes, recordings, talking books, large print books, paperbacks.... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: pattyClink Date: 13 Jun 06 - 02:31 PM Wow, I had no idea this was standard practice. It seems an excessive number of duplicates when libraries are having to discard old books to keep the shelves from overflowing, and when funds for new stuff are so limited. Thanks for the info. I had no idea reserve requests were used to make your shopping lists. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Clinton Hammond Date: 13 Jun 06 - 02:39 PM "nobody is going to sit there and read... on a monitor screen" You folks just don't grok do you? Man.... Never seen a handheld computer? Never imagined ONE piece of nano-tech paper that was capable of recieving wi-fi transmissions and displaying text, picture, video? There's a wireless, digital age coming, that none of us are going to live to see.... but it's gonna be grand! |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 13 Jun 06 - 02:59 PM Ah, Clinton -- we have wireless installed here (as many libraries do) and are investigating (by trying one out) the Nokia 770 as a way to free the staff from having to run back to the PCs just to check the catalog. When our automation system moves to a web-based configuration later this year we'll also us it to check out materials. Moreover, we are a node for the downtown-supplied public wireless net and could access the downtown merchants wireless net if we had a reason to do so. We have T-1 line coming in, a 3 MB microwave link on the roof, eleven servers, and provide links to more than thirty individual databases. Children's books, and soon adult and spoken books, are available from our website. Are you sure you've been in a public library in, say, the last ten years?? |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Scoville Date: 13 Jun 06 - 04:32 PM Multipe copies of "hot" books won't be kept forever. They'll supply the demand while it's there and then be discarded when people stop checking them out so fast. My mother's friend does book sales for the library and a lot of their discards go to schools, nursing homes, etc., or are sold to raise money for newer books. They don't put them in the garbage (unless they're falling apart, of course). "Weeding" is standard practice in librarianship and it's not a bad thing. We don't just "throw out" books randomly--we pull out ones that are worn out, whose information has been superseded by something more accurate and up-to-date, ones that aren't being checked out, etc., and try to replace them with something that better serves our patrons. It's not perfect and we can't make everybody happy, but we try to make it more a "tailoring" process than just elimination. My library doesn't stock a lot of what I'd like to read, either, but they have a lot of people to serve and they're supposed to be accessible to everybody (including the handicapped, blind, deaf, non-English speakers, etc.). That's a lot of ground to cover on a chronic lack of funds. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Wesley S Date: 13 Jun 06 - 04:37 PM Video stores do the same thing. I've bought some pretty good movies for dirt cheap that way. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Clinton Hammond Date: 13 Jun 06 - 04:38 PM Rap... that's stone age compared to what I'm talking about..... But we can only run by learning to walk eh..... Nice Tablet PC..... one day, not too far off, even that'll seem like a flint ax..... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Don Firth Date: 13 Jun 06 - 04:41 PM Without genuine printed books, one good electromagnetic pulse and your library is cooked. Don Firth |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 13 Jun 06 - 05:45 PM I'm not worried about books (tomes, that is) being superseded. Humanity has NEVER discarded a format for the preservation of knowledge. The materials might change, but the concept of the format remains the same. For example: scrolls --> microfilm, "scrolling" computer screens, tape recordings cunieform --> CDs, DVDs |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 13 Jun 06 - 08:53 PM Talking of microfilm, anyone want a 'fiche reader' - I have one lying around which was to be used for past issues of technical magazines - nowadays the content is obsolete by the time the yearly fiche arrives... "Humanity has NEVER discarded a format for the preservation of knowledge" Yep, just look in a cemetary... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 13 Jun 06 - 09:42 PM Nope, never have. What, pray tell, is the difference between microfiche and a photograph of the document, apart from size? I could reduce this to the size of type on a microfiche card if I wanted to do so. It's just another way of recording knowledge. That's all any form of more-or-less permanent knowledge recording is. The problem that is already upon us the reading the knowledge we've stored on various media. Does your computer have a 5.25 inch floppy drive? How about an 8 inch drive? Can you even play the reel-to-reel tapes you might have around or vinyl LPs? How about 8 or 16 mm films? How about Betamax video tapes? 8-track recordings? And I could go on. And while mag tapes slowly erase themselves, we do little or nothing to stop the decay. I am in no way bashing modern data recording methods, either. I am simply saying that in our rush to develop "newer and better" we are losing what was stored on the old -- and some of it is irrepacable. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Lin in Kansas Date: 14 Jun 06 - 02:22 AM Rapaire-- Thank you for your links, above. And thank you for your spirited and sensible defense of libraries, librarians, and real books. May I quote your last sentence above? I like it a lot! Lin |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: kendall Date: 14 Jun 06 - 04:20 AM Sure. Stock her ravings. She's no crazier than Ezra Pound, or Hitler. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Paul Burke Date: 14 Jun 06 - 04:54 AM "Humanity has NEVER discarded a format for the preservation of knowledge" I've got an 8" floppy! Yes, one of the big old disks from the early 80s, I keep it just as a memento. Some few specialist systems can read it now- in 20,30,50 years time no one will be able to. The Digital Domesday project of the 80s was only rescued at the last moment by someone who remembered it, just like a monk copying an ancient Latin manuscript. Over the last 60 years or so we've been creating new media and discarding them with increasing frequency. Also, the life of the media is a problem- even with current or recent technology, it's not uncommon to get out an old CD or floppy, only to find that it's now unreadable, only 5 or 10 years later. While the Oxyrhyncus manuscripts were partially recovered with the aid of modern technology, the recovery of digital media in a thousand years' time will involve not just reading the medium and collating the fragments, but decrypting it too. Remember that we still can't read Linear-A, and some argue that we never will. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: JohnInKansas Date: 14 Jun 06 - 05:04 AM What, pray tell, is the difference between microfiche and a photograph of the document, apart from size? In every place where I've had to resort to microfiche (admittedly mostly in "company libraries" and for industrial reference materials) microfiche was always <47% legible, usually the films were covered with enough dust they could have been stored on an open beach (it felt like sand), the original shots were usually out of focues on alternating sides of adjacent frames so that you had to re-focus the reader twice for each frame, and the projection bulb in the reader was within about 4.2 minutes (or less) of burn-out every time I turned one on. And there was always a scratch through and obliterating the one number you really needed. About 30 minutes at a time was the limit for most users, leading immediately to 3 aspirins, a cup of strong coffee, and a calm dark room for about a half hour to get rid of the headache. (I know it was a rhetorical question, but I'm pretending you really meant to ask.) Some early microfilm wasn't much better, although the later 16mm and 35mm "filmstrips" usually had much better legibility, possibly because the winding into "rolls" kept the film flatter (or more at least more uniformly curled). References on CDs, in magazine-loading readers were a vast improvement - usually; although even with them you could only search what someone had indexed when the disks were made. Digital full text, preferably with tags (SGML - if anyone remembers it?), was a great idea, but there's still 1little material archived that way where it's accessible to most of the world. 1 As a percenatge of what needs to be archived. John |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 14 Jun 06 - 08:56 AM Remember Write Only Memory (WOM)? :-) |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 14 Jun 06 - 09:00 AM Sadly, if you do a Google on WOM... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: Rapparee Date: 14 Jun 06 - 10:43 AM We have the inutes of the Library Board of Trustees back to the 1910s, and other documents even earlier. These must be preserved permanently, so I'm having ALL of them, even the most recent, collected and bound. Not burned to CD like the city is doing, but bound. Paper pages. This is because you can read the stuff in ten years (or less, given the pace of change). On the other hand, yesterday I ordered another on-line reference service, an annual. And I think that electronic ink and other such innovations are, for certain purposes, absolutely terrific solutions. Just as a Hummer has a place in civilian life (lumbering for example), every format has a place. We just can't make the mistake of assuming that change has stopped. (Sure, go ahead and quote me. See if I care. Remember that it's worth what you paid for it.) |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: BuckMulligan Date: 14 Jun 06 - 11:06 AM Hard copy will never go away. For one thing there are - and always will be, IMO - folks for whom "book" and "reading" involve more than "text" and the visual ingestion of the text. Books are more than aggregations of text on the physical page. For another, there will always be folk without access to electronic repositories; hand-held, wireless etc. notwithstanding. And there will always be those who choose to remain outside that sphere; folks who view and will view books and reading rather as some in the 21st century might view, for example, chain mail fabrication. Or even more, who knows. It's rather like surmising that since Gutenberg, there would be no illuminated MSS produced. Didn't work out that way; illumination changed, to be sure, but the concept of illuminated text (or or illumination/illustration as a component of text) survived. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: If it was up to you... From: kendall Date: 15 Jun 06 - 05:42 AM From my cold dead hands will they pry my books! |
