Dear Libraryland…
Karen G. Schneider is brilliant.
It is both ironic and poignant that librarians are still worrying about bibliographic control, after ceding so much of the same to the companies that now rent them journal access per annum at usurious rates, digitize their book collections into DRM obscurity, or sell them ponderous, antiquated management systems that on close inspection do little more than serve as storehouses for the metadata specific to the formats of bygone eras, bold days when we saw our central roles as defenders and curators of our cultural heritage.
We have moved from the librarian as information artisan a professional creating and using tools to manage information to the librarian as surrogate vendor, facilitating what is essentially the offshoring of thousands of years of information into private hands.
Read her whole piece at the ALA Techsource blog.
Just yesterday I was talking with a library school student volunteer, saying that weeding our collection reminds me of just how different our collecting practices are now than they once were — we no longer buy the majority of our content, we rent, or at best, lease, it. And we’ve resigned ourselves to that fact.
I wasn’t nearly as scathing, or as elegant, as KGS. Thanks for pointing it out.
Karen is a Force for Good and whip smart, too. However, I was startled by her characterizing the librarian as “information artisan -— a professional creating and using tools to manage information.” Sounds dangerous, like manipulating frothing beakers behind inch-thick acid-proof glass.
When did this happen? Musta been real, real recently. The artisanal librarian has to be the rutherfordium (No. 104) or dubnium (No. 105) of the periodic table of librarianship. Me, I’m still back at, I don’t know, bismuth (No. 83).
Artisanal. I like that. In fact, I’d like a little more time to get used to my artisanal status, please, before I move on to “surrogate vendor,” which is apparently the ununseptium (No. 117) of librarianship.
I think I might like being artisanal, even though that “anal” seems a little too prominent. Hey, can I skip “surrogate vendor” entirely? It might help me catch up with you all!
“facilitating the offshoring of information”…
Library professionals “facilitate” access to the regnant media for information access: What does Karen Schneider expect us to do?…
What does Karen Schneider expect us to do?
Why don’t you ask her?
[...] 15th, 2007 by level1librarian A semi-random search lead me to Karen G. Schneider’s entry (via The Goblin in the Library) in the ALA Tech Source blog: Dear Library of [...]