[1257] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: Chronicle Article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (news@Think.COM)
Mon Sep 21 12:45:18 1992
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1992 11:14:37 CDT
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
From: news@Think.COM
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In-reply-to: "KAREN S. SUMMERHILL"'s message of Thu, 17 Sep 1992 16:28:41 CDT
And goodness, what a socialistic idea for an entire university to SHARE all
^^^^^^^^^^^
their information resources using a central organization called a library!!
^^^^^^^
As opposed to an anarchic system, where people share the information resources
that they want to share in a distributed, co-operative organisation.
My question for Ken and others who see the decentralization of information
resources as 'a good thing', is: when all the departments have their own
"libraries", that is, collections of resources, in addition to every
professor and researcher's own private collection of materials, what will the
students be using to do THEIR work?
The information collected for them by their professors and lecturers; what
else! Information doesn't need to live in a lump of dead tree, surrounded by
slices of coloured cow skin. In the virtual library, information can be
omnipresent- it's not a zero-sum game any more.
Is each department going to invite each student taking a class in to use
the departmental microcomputer lab, the departmental photocopiers,
the departmental collection of books and journals and indexes, the
departmental database subscriptions, the departmental reference librarians?
At my alma mater, Imperial College, University of London, the top science and
engineering university in the UK, most of the big departments had their own
libraries; the same was true at the Technion, in Israel (well, at least
for the subjects I was looking for)
the , but we won't NEED reference librarians, will we? or catalogers, or
bibliographers...no, no the departments will take care of all of that, too.)
Is that a rhetorical question? If not, what's the correct answer.
If a student needs political science materials and history materials, and
sociology materials for a paper, are we going to send the student hopping
from
department to department, or will the university pay to duplicate those
interdisciplinary materials in each separate department? (I don't for a
Hey, humanities is one subject, isn't it? I thought they made it all up,
anyway. For the transition period whilst dead trees are still floating around
what's wrong with a local version of ILL. You could pick your book out of the
online catalog, send off your request to the appropriate store, and have it
delivered via the internal mail system to your office or mail box. As an
added bonus, If someone else is currently lugging the tree around, it could
mail them to see if they're still using it.
Georgetown Law Library
ksumme01@gumedlib.dml.georgetown.edu
Simon Spero // Advocatus Diabboli
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