Responses to Mann on LC report
Candy Schwartz, a LIS professor at Simmons, is maintaining coverage of the discussion that has ensued in response to the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (and Tom Mann’s response). If you want to follow that, go here.
3 comments on “Responses to Mann on LC report”
Thanks for this link, Rory…this is a lot for us catalogers to absorb all at once and do our day jobs; interesting but a formidable amount of text to wade through, separating proverbial wheat from chaff, especially for newbie catalogers like myself.
From experience, I tend to side with Thomas Mann.
Just so nobody gets disappointed, my blog is really a way to communicate with students, mostly admin stuff (assignments and such), jobs, and things they should read.
In case anybody’s curious about that David Bell article, here’s the citation:
WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO SCHOLARSHIP.
The Bookless Future
in the May 2, 2005 issue of the New Republic. It’s online if you subscribe.
I’m not sure how Bell would feel about the lesson I draw from his article. Bell is actually a digitization advocate who thinks print books are “on their way out,” but he’s really candid about the downside to digitization. I was almost won over to his views by the article, but, on balance, I think the evidence he presents favors a more cautious attitude.
He says libraries should invest in developing better e-book readers so we can “stay relevant,” but I think that accepts a bit too quickly the digitization model. Why should we spend our precious resources on an unproven technology when computer makers have plenty of their own money to develop it? I know this may seem like a “head-in-the-sand” attitude, but I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay attention to developments in the computer field. We have people like Karen Schneider who will make sure we’re aware of them, and that’s good.
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