Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Not sure what this means

From: Mark Vega <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 11:10:02 -0400

While it may seem contradictory, as an IT specialist I look upon the digital
age with both excitement and trepidation: new possibilities fraught with new
dangers.

As humans become more and more dependent upon their new digital tools, I
worry that we will forget how to do the real work ourselves (how many people
today can start a fire without a lighter? how many high schoolers can do
long division without a calculator?).  I often think back upon one of the
original Star Trek episodes in which the Enterprise crew came upon a society
that had become so dependent upon the supercomputer that ran virtually
everything on their planet that, when it began to fail, they were not only
at a loss as to how to fix it, but also as to how to take over the
life-sustaining tasks that it had been performing for them.

Like many speculative fiction writers I've read, I can also imagine a day
when an EMP weapon (electro-magnetic pulse - they already exist, you know)
could wipe out the entirety of a society's digital knowledge base and throw
civilization back into the equivalent of the Stone Age.  If you've ever had
a hard drive failure, you are already aware how ephemeral digital data can be.

I also have concerns about committing all of Man's accumulated knowledge
over to corporations.  Is anyone out there really comfortable with allowing
Google to become the sole arbiter and storehouse of this information? 
Google may seem like a benign giant, but it is a for-profit (monetary
profit, that is) entity and it only takes one CEO with other than benign
intentions to change that.  And does anyone really trust Bing (given
Microsoft's track record) to make their information decisions for them?

So I, both digital tool-maker and anachronism, while continuing to
contribute to the new age of information storage and retrieval and to revel
in the possibilities, will also continue to hedge my bets and hoard my own
personal physical library and look to my local library for unfettered,
uncorporatized access to information. 

Or, to paraphrase Charlton Heston: You can have my books when you pry them
from my cold, dead hands!

--
Mark Vega
Programmer/Analyst
University of California, Irvine Libraries
--

---

From: "Miksa, Shawne" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 14:26:24 -0500

Mark--wow, thank you. I thought I was the only person with these worries. 

**************************************************************
Shawne D. Miksa, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Library and Information Sciences
College of Information
University of North Texas
email: [email-masked]
http://courses.unt.edu/smiksa/index.htm
office 940-565-3560 fax 940-565-3101
**************************************************************
________________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Mark Vega [[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2010 10:10 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Not sure what this means

---

From: Cindy Harper <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 15:46:05 -0400

Has anyone thought of a spin-off of Fahrenheit 451 where the corporate
owners of the electronic texts destroy the physical texts so that they
cannot challenge the authority of the electronic version?  (or pick your own
paranoia about corporate owndership)? I haven't read any science fiction for
a long time, but I would think that Google Books has spawned some dystopian
finction.

Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian
Colgate University Libraries
[email-masked]
315-228-7363

---

From: Eric Lease Morgan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 16:14:53 -0400

> cannot challenge the authority of the electronic version?

  Unique collections and Fahrenheit 451
  
  With the advent of globally networked computers and digitizing
  equipment, libraries can now provide more and better access to
  their special collections and considering the current economic
  milieu where information is readily bought, sold, and licienced,
  this may be the only future for libraries. This future may end up
  looking very much like the conclusion to Ray Bradbury's
  Fahrenheit 451...

  http://infomotions.com/musings/unique-collections/

-- 
Eric Lease Morgan

---

From: Laval Hunsucker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 May 2010 14:32:29 -0700

Shawne Miksa wrote :  

> I thought I was the only person with these worries.

No cause for concern. I suspect that there are very few 
persons *without* these worries, in varying degrees of 
frequency and intensity. It's just that it's so much easier 
to suppress them, and even easier not to bring them up 
in polite company as it were.  But -- How appropriate 
*are* they -- really ??

And a thought-exercise perhaps :  If Mark is not 
exaggerating about such "new possibilities fraught with 
new dangers", how different would our work be if we 
were genuinely to take those dangers deadly seriously ?

What should we be doing differently ??

- Laval Hunsucker
   Breukelen, Nederland

---

From: Sue Sparks <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 May 2010 14:31:20 +0100

This post from a commentator on issues relating to the survival of
journalism in the digital age may be of interest as it shows that the
concerns of many people on this list are not confined to librarians

http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/05/30/the-search-world-is-flat/

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Laval Hunsucker
Sent: 30 May 2010 22:32
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Not sure what this means

- Laval Hunsucker
   Breukelen, Nederland

----- Original Message ----
From: "Miksa, Shawne" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Sent: Fri, May 28, 2010 9:26:24 PM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Not sure what this means

Mark--wow, thank you. I thought I was the only person with these
worries. 

From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [[email-masked]]
On Behalf Of Mark Vega [[email-masked]]

While it may seem contradictory, as an IT specialist I look upon the
digital
age with both excitement and trepidation: new possibilities fraught with
new
dangers.

As humans become more and more dependent upon their new digital tools, I
worry that we will forget how to do the real work ourselves (how many
people
today can start a fire without a lighter? how many high schoolers can do
long division without a calculator?).  I often think back upon one of
the
original Star Trek episodes in which the Enterprise crew came upon a
society
that had become so dependent upon the supercomputer that ran virtually
everything on their planet that, when it began to fail, they were not
only
at a loss as to how to fix it, but also as to how to take over the
life-sustaining tasks that it had been performing for them.

Like many speculative fiction writers I've read, I can also imagine a
day
when an EMP weapon (electro-magnetic pulse - they already exist, you
know)
could wipe out the entirety of a society's digital knowledge base and
throw
civilization back into the equivalent of the Stone Age.  If you've ever
had
a hard drive failure, you are already aware how ephemeral digital data
can be.

over to corporations.  Is anyone out there really comfortable with
allowing

So I, both digital tool-maker and anachronism, while continuing to
contribute to the new age of information storage and retrieval and to
revel
in the possibilities, will also continue to hedge my bets and hoard my
own
personal physical library and look to my local library for unfettered,
uncorporatized access to information.

Or, to paraphrase Charlton Heston: You can have my books when you pry
them
from my cold, dead hands!