Tuesday, December 9, 2008
new vs old
Web 2.0 is fascinating. What a platform for democracy and startups and even upstarts. Might it not be worthwhile, however, to continue to have access to old-style library ammenities -card catalogs, trained reference librarians, physical books in our hands that have been repaired as necessary, frontline people that smile and say hello to patrons by name, cozy corners with good natural light to read by and a total absence of click, click, click- in at least some part of each library system in case we simply crash the system or run out of electricity.? Perhaps some ideas should actually be "set in stone" so they won't get totally lost. Recent archeological excavations around the world continue to astound us with what we have already "lost" on every continent.
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3 comments:
Yes, wouldn't it be nice if we had the option to crap in a hole and wipe with a corn cob and die of injuries because we had to travel by a slow horse and buggy to the doctor who treated us with leeches, etc.
I'm just ribbin' ya, of course. But I also think that the world will pass us by if we hold on to the past too tightly.
In response to your "straw man" argument response to my first ever blog, please see my exhaustive and exhausting treatise on corn cobs.
I still would prefer to think that we could easily keep a life-line back to older technologies just to make sure that we haven't actually lost important information simply because circumstances have deteriorated and we cannot upgrade/maintain digital technologies during electrical outages.
Hmmm. More items to blog about. Survey Monkey was fun but do surveys really tell us what we want to know or do they tell us what a few people want us to know? For example, "Ease of parking while using the MCPL". Most of the comments we hear at the desk suggest that the patrons were not aware that they needed to insiste we provide plenty of parking when we built the new part of the library in 96/97. They don't really want to hear that "the City needs to address the downtown parking issue". They just want it to be easy to park so they can use MCPL without needing to move the car every two hours or needing to walk many blocks while loaded down with books/kids/walkers etc. Patrons seem to have thought that somehow MCPL would take care of this problem from the beginning. Now, twelve years later, we still don't have an answer. Should we make another survey?
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