Library Inc. - - 2 views
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Yet libraries, the intellectual heart of universities, have become perhaps the most commercialized academic area within universities, with troubling implications for the future of higher education.
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Through innocuous incremental stages, academic libraries have reached a point where they are now guided largely by the mores of commerce, not academe.
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Over the last decade, however, as the number and cost of journals have soared, most libraries have decided to forgo purchasing hard copies. The shift from owning a journal to merely providing access to its digital incarnation has, of course, saved some money. But those savings come in tandem with detrimental changes both to the content of library collections and the ways those collections are used.
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According to both the professional literature and information-vending companies' usability studies, a library's chief task is to meet the information needs of its patrons
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For university libraries, retrieving what is known should be only the beginning. They are laboratories of the mind, unique places where questions that have never before been asked can be formulated and answered; they are centers of teaching where patrons can learn about the organization and the production of knowledge
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or universities, the libraries' experience is a cautionary tale. Commercial practices, technologies, and innovations often seem to benefit and support the academic mission of universities. But commercial innovations are not value-free, and it has proven very difficult for libraries to embrace some components while rejecting others.
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Interesting, if a bit unbalanced, about the corruption of university libraries by commercial publishers and the pressure of "good enough" information in a Googlized world
