Michael Madison moves the Google debate forward
This is an excellent and important post:
What about librarians and librarianship and “the values that librarianship supports”? Recognize that these shouldn’t necessarily get lumped together. It’s certainly possible to defend “the values that librarianship supports” yet not be a librarian or an information professional, and it’s possible to defend those values and still think that Google Book Search is consistent with them. (After all, in the vast majority of information policy debates, I think that Siva and I are arguing on the same side.) I’m not a professional librarian but I’ve used academic libraries at several pretty good universities (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, as well as at Pitt), and I like to think that one big point of librarianship is putting information in the hands of patrons, so that patrons can do with it as they wish. Not only do I not see Google interfering with that, I see Google supporting that. People — patrons — will find information; in my view that’s an enduring truth, and Google Book Search won’t prevent that from happening, and librarians and Google Book Search are complements in that pursuit, not substitutes. Have academic librarians sold out by not building and controlling a “book search” facility with their own university resources? If their mission is largely to deliver the content, I don’t see it.
There is much more. Please read the rest, especially the librarians.
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