(not wanting to be anonymous, but I'm not a LiveJournal user nor have an openID)
I work for a larger national library, and I agree with every scrap you say here. The researcher may be very fond of paper indeed, but I feel that he's coming up with arguments based on what paper does for him, (maybe the smell gets him high. It sure does to me) not what content there is within nor how to go about making the most of it.
My job is to make our catalog come alive, and trust me, there are some seriously funky cool and better ways to find information than what any manual process can bring, guaranteed. We've got ouself some 6 million items in our collection, and about 4 million of these have catalog records. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the old library of Alexandria isn't standing. It's never about what to do, but always about how much money we've got to do it.
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Amen!
Date: 2005-07-22 07:12 am (UTC)I work for a larger national library, and I agree with every scrap you say here. The researcher may be very fond of paper indeed, but I feel that he's coming up with arguments based on what paper does for him, (maybe the smell gets him high. It sure does to me) not what content there is within nor how to go about making the most of it.
My job is to make our catalog come alive, and trust me, there are some seriously funky cool and better ways to find information than what any manual process can bring, guaranteed. We've got ouself some 6 million items in our collection, and about 4 million of these have catalog records. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the old library of Alexandria isn't standing. It's never about what to do, but always about how much money we've got to do it.