Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
1More
School libraries as a "third place" - Home - Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog - 0 views
13More
Gutenberg 2.0 | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2010 - 10 views
-
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.”
-
Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”
- ...8 more annotations...
-
“The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much,” she acknowledges. Therefore, librarians need to teach students not only how to search, but “how to think critically about what they have found…what they are missing… and how to judge their sources.”
-
But making comparisons between digital and analog libraries on issues of cost or use or preservation is not straightforward. If students want to read a book cover to cover, the printed copy may be deemed superior with respect to “bed, bath and beach,” John Palfrey points out. If they just want to read a few pages for class, or mine the book for scattered references to a single subject, the digital version’s searchability could be more appealing; alternatively, students can request scans of the pages or chapter they want to read as part of a program called “scan and deliver” (in use at the HD and other Harvard libraries) and receive a link to images of the pages via e-mail within four days.
-
(POD) would allow libraries to change their collection strategies: they could buy and print a physical copy of a book only if a user requested it. When the user was done with the book, it would be shelved. It’s a vision of “doing libraries ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case,’” says Palfrey. (At the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue, a POD machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg is already in use. Find something you like in Google’s database of public-domain books—perhaps one provided by Harvard—and for $8 you can own a copy, printed and bound before your wondering eyes in minutes. Clear Plexiglas allows patrons to watch the process—hot glue, guillotine-like trimming blades, and all—until the book is ejected, like a gumball, from a chute at the bottom.)
-
We’re rethinking the physical spaces to accommodate more of the type of learning that is expected now, the types of assignments that faculty are making, that have two or three students huddled around a computer working together, talking.”
-
In terms of research, students are asking each other for information more now than in the past, when they might have asked a librarian.
-
On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.
-
it’s not just a service organization. I would even go so far as to call it the nervous system of our corporate body.”
67More
The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books - 0 views
-
the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity
- ...62 more annotations...
-
second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll
-
technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word.
-
would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself.
-
continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts.
-
every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.
-
aving learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened
-
newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events
-
We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?
-
Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.
-
Unbelievers used to dismiss Henry Clay Folger's determination to accumulate copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare as the mania of a crank.
-
When Folger's collection grew beyond three dozen copies, his friends scoffed at him as Forty Folio Folger.
-
Piracy was so pervasive in early modern Europe that best-sellers could not be blockbusters as they are today
-
They abridged, expanded, and reworked texts as they pleased, without worrying about the authors' intentions.
-
question in perspective by discussing two views of the library, which I would describe as grand illusions—grand and partly true.
-
o put it positively, there is something to be said for both visions, the library as a citadel and the Internet as open space.
-
Google proposal seemed to offer a way to make all book learning available to all people, or at least those privileged enough to have access to the World Wide Web
-
will open up possibilities for research involving vast quantities of data, which could never be mastered without digitization
-
scholars will be able to trace references to individuals, books, and ideas throughout the entire network of correspondence that undergirded the Enlightenment
-
notably American Memory sponsored by the Library of Congress[1] and the Valley of the Shadow created at the University of Virginia[2] —have demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of databases on this scale
-
2. Although Google pursued an intelligent strategy by signing up five great libraries, their combined holdings will not come close to exhausting the stock of books in the United States.
-
1. According to the most utopian claim of the Googlers, Google can put virtually all printed books on-line.
-
If Google missed this book, and other books like it, the researcher who relied on Google would never be able to locate certain works of great importance.
-
On the contrary, Google will make them more important than ever. To support this view, I would like to organize my argument around eight points.
-
For books under copyright, however, Google will probably display only a few lines at a time, which it claims is legal under fair use.
-
3. Although it is to be hoped that the publishers, authors, and Google will settle their dispute, it is difficult to see how copyright will cease to pose a problem.
-
But nothing suggests that it will take account of the standards prescribed by bibliographers, such as the first edition to appear in print or the edition that corresponds most closely to the expressed intention of the author.
-
Google defines its mission as the communication of information—right now, today; it does not commit itself to conserving texts indefinitely.
-
it has not yet ventured into special collections, where the rarest works are to be found. And of course the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google's capacity to digitize
-
Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete
-
7. Google plans to digitize many versions of each book, taking whatever it gets as the copies appear, assembly-line fashion, from the shelves; but will it make all of them available?
-
No single copy of an eighteenth-century best-seller will do justice to the endless variety of editions. Serious scholars will have to study and compare many editions, in the original versions, not in the digitized reproductions that Google will sort out according to criteria that probably will have nothing to do with bibliographical scholarship.
-
8. Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book.
-
ts physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.
-
Rare book rooms are a vital part of research libraries, the part that is most inaccessible to Google. But libraries also provide places for ordinary readers to immerse themselves in books,
-
I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns.
-
he research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.