Harvard’s Peter Bol, Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations, points out [in the Harvard Magazine article] the essential and increasing relevance of wise librarians. In the piece he asks, “Who has the most scientific knowledge of large-scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians. If you’ve got 16 million items, that’s a very big guarantee.”
[Snip]
While critics say libraries—or librarians—are irrelevant (“Throw [Harvard’s collections] in the Charles,” the piece quotes one scientist as saying), this is simply the parsing of terms. Google is just another word for “library,” and once Google determines who—and what—their own librarians are we will turn to them to guide us to Widener, Bodleian, and Firestone. Librarians will continue to do what they’ve always done: make access democratic. Increasingly, they will allow books left untouched for generations to become hot.
“Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we add value to this process,” says Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is “not a random bunch of stuff, but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry,” he explains. “The result was a collection that was a consciously created, carefully crafted, deliberately maintained, constrained body of material.”
“What worries us all,” says Nancy M. Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, “is that we really haven’t tested the longevity for a lot of these digital resources.”
“When we run into a problematic complex patient with a clearly genetic problem from birth, and I ask what the problem might be and what tests are to be ordered, their reflex is either to search their memories for what they learned in medical school or to look at a textbook that might be relevant. They don’t have what I would characterize as the ‘Google reflex,’ which is to go to the right databases to look things up.” The students doubtless use Google elsewhere in their lives, but in medicine, he explains, “the whole idea of just-in-time learning and using these websites is not reflexive. That is highly troublesome because the time when you could keep up even with a subspecialty like pediatric neurosurgery by reading a couple of journals is long, long gone.”
---- Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School
It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”
----Ess librarian and professor of law John G. Palfrey VII
Ed. Note: Right on Professor Paltrey! Our things changing with the Google generation and others becoming better are retrieving information (eg. searching a web database)during the past five years? See this ResourceShelf from Friday, "What Were the Most Popular Search Terms at Google, Bing, and Yahoo During March?"
Jeffrey Hamburger—a scholar of an even earlier medium, the medieval manuscript—who was recently named chair of a library advisory group, says that “the notion that we are going to abandon the codex as we have known it—the traditional book—and go digital overnight is very misguided.
Again, this is a five page article and we selected only five passages/quotes. The entire article is "must read" material.
Ed. Note: The article uses a amount of space regarding Google Book Search. Since this article has a focus on other issues, that's not very surprising. Though, if Judge Chin makes a decision that changes the program or concept, then it will be easy to say that more space should have devoted to it. Nevertheless, Google or no Google, printed materials are and will continue to be digitized by a wide range or organizations.
Two points. 1) A quote mentions the amount of large amounts of material that could from from China. Given Google's current "situation" in China you have to wonder if that's possible.
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