[1203] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: Fwd: Chronicle Article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gregory.A.Finnegan@Dartmouth.EDU)
Mon Sep 14 12:23:23 1992
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 11:15:04 CDT
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
From: Gregory.A.Finnegan@Dartmouth.EDU
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I'll stick my neck out & reply to Bill Arms' clarification of his thoughts as
transmitted by the CHE. Overall, I think his vision is probably correct.
Where I'm less certain is the difference between such decentralized
information provision happening for 'political' vs 'intellectual' reasons.
I'm responding particularly to Arms' statement that
" Librarian skills are vital in such activities, but the
natural focus for leadership is the discipline as represented by the
academic department and the professional society. "
As a librarian who's also a teaching member of an academic department, my
perspective is perhaps different. As noted, Arms' is right if he means that
faculty will automatically assume they're the "natural focus," but I'm not so
sure they should be considered so once issues of intellectual access come
into play. It's true that stuff in offices will serve a wider constituency
once it's on a network. That's true in old-fashioned ways now: personal
books are put on reserve; I've brought in books for patrons I own in my
research area that this ARL library doesn't (and shouldn't) have. But the
vision of decentralization raises two issues that I think librarians are FAR
better equipped to administer.
1st is "simple" intellectual access: faculty when sharing/using own
materials provide, even if informally, instruction and context and, not
least, choice. We're the specialists at generalizing such things and in
designing systems that work for naive users. And my experience even with
this 'elite' faculty is that very few of them have any systematic sense of
information retrieval (old OR new, paper or electronic); all have a strategy
that works, of course, but almost all could be very much more efficient and
comprehensive with less effort.
2nd is parochial vs. universal vision. In any given subject, the dept. will
have a depth of expertise others don't. But that does NOT mean they'll know
or appreciate how others use "their" info. Our psych. dept. has pronounced
views on what they do and don't want, and have never grasped that we aren't
spending "their" money on facets of psych they don't think are important.
Quite apart from our duty to build a collection for the future, when
personnel and fashions in academe will be different, it's also true that lots
of other disciplines need to know, now, about "psych" research and writing
other than what's researched and written here. A long way of saying that
librarians have a balance that scholars too rarely have.
A sense of history helps: we didn't always have libraries like these before
the last hundred years or so (or not even yet--try Harvard's famous 100+).
Dartmouth's library only became larger than those of student-run-and-funded
literary societies around the 1870's or so (certainly after mid-C19). The
German 'seminar library' system is hardly an inspiring model for distributed
responsibility for wide access to information. I was told by a Czech
sociologist that the in 1945-48 period, when the Charles Univ. in Prague was
being re-stocked w/ American book donations, the faculty member in charge of
the sociology seminar library maintained his control over the new information
by shelving the books spine-inward!
We have libraries, especially US-style centralized ones, in part to
democratize access to the contents and to achieve economies of scale.
Networked electronic resources aid both goals. But the choices about which
resources have priority and which systems will be used to access them, and by
whom, are questions we're better trained and experienced to deal with. Even
if we share 'power' w/ others (or gain it?), we should push to have our input
continue, based on genuine expertise that remains just as important as it has
always been. With any luck we'll even have that expertise acknowledged!
In sum, I think Arms is right about the forces tending toward distributed
information. And part of the answer is distributing librarians--as Arms
himself did when he made several CMU librarians administrators of computing
departments. Librarians will have to push ourselves forward and make sure
that everyone with a fileserver realizes there's more to it that!
There is a distributed universe already. Our integrated info. system--a
joint library/computer ctr. project--has "non-library" on-campus resources as
well as WAIS and menu-choice Internet access to external resources. And
we've cataloged in "the Library's" catalog electronic resources on campus
that we don't "own." But we libns. have a large role in the design of the
system that makes those resources so much more accessible.
A side issue, raised in some other contexts (cf. recent speculation at Duke
U.) is keeping straight the differences between time-value information
disciplines (STM) and soc.scis. and humanities; the former can and will get
by more and more with electronic resources that can 'live' anywhere on a
network, but the latter are going to need many cubic meters of centralized
bookstacks for a very long time to come, Proj. Gutenberg notwithstanding!
When your provost is a physicist or an engineer, it may take extra effort to
remind her/him that disks and cables won't enable laying-off shelvers or
catalogers or skipping the 8-figure building expansion!
Greg.Finnegan@Dartmouth.edu
Humanities & Social Sciences Reference-Bibliographer;
Adjunct Assoc. Prof. of Anthropology
6025 Baker Library, Room 104
Dartmouth College
Hanover NH 03755-3525
