Subject: [NGC4LIB] A library user's perspective on library technology

From: "B.G. Sloan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:47:18 -0800

There was an interesting paper published in College and Research Libraries about a year ago, from the perspective of a library user:
 
Abbott, Andrew. The traditional future: A computational theory of library research. College & Research Libraries, 69, 524-45. November, 2008.
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crljournal/2008/nov/Abbott08.pdf
 
Abbott is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago. He defines library research as: "research conducted by disciplinary experts (such as musicologists, literature professors, historians, and political scientists) that is primarily based on materials collected in libraries." So, Abbott is discussing the impact of library technology on a subset of scholars, and not on scholarship in general.
 
A couple of excerpts:
 
"...given what library research aims to do and how it actually works, most of the moves toward the technologization of library practices are either neutral or harmful to the enterprise as it has been conducted...library researchers have to defend their resources against the technologists, who have no idea of what library research is or what it aims for, and against the administrators, who see in the false technological argument an intellectual justification for the huge savings they hope to realize by decommissioning libraries."
 
And...
 
"If you are going to have a serious library research community, you have to have both a physical library and a technological one. The new technology is not a panacea - more a useful extension. While it provides wonderful benefits to the many scholars not lucky enough to work at universities with great physical collections, and while it enables some things never before allowed, it does not in fact 'revolutionize' library research. The technologized library may, of course, sweep all before it. But that victory would entail the loss of something far better than the technologized library can produce."
 
I think it would be very useful to somehow convince scholars in other disciplines to write up their reflections about how they use libraries and information resources, and how library "technologization" might help or hinder them in their pursuits. It might provide some interesting insights for those of us charged with developing next-generation library systems.
 
Bernie Sloan