Organization: Samford University Computer Services
Newsgroups: soc.roots
Date:         Wed, 23 Dec 1992 09:05:00 CST
Reply-To:     THE GAR <GLWARNER@SAMFORD.BITNET>
From:         THE GAR <GLWARNER@SAMFORD.BITNET>
Subject:      In Defense of Libraries...
Comments: To: Fred Rump from home <fr@COMPU.COM>, ROOTS-L@NDSUVM1.BITNET

On Tue, 22 Dec 1992 21:38:53 Fred concluded his lengthy diatribe on
the many faults of libraries by saying:
>I don't think you need to carry the entire burden on your own head.  Take your
>own advice and work from within.  Maybe you can make a little change somewhere
>sometime.  Some of us actually have the privilege of being able to affect
>change, for the betterment of mankind, in our lives - very few of us.

I would just like to mention a few things here.  First, libraries are my
favorite place to spend time, and I have a great respect for librarians.
I cannot put into words my debt of gratitude for those librarians who
have spent their time and effort to make information available to the
public, and who have devoted their lives to bettering our society by
preserving and passing on information for the future.  I cannot imagine
what our world would have been like without libraries, and I cannot
begin to count the losses we would have suffered by their absence!
How many great minds have been kindled to their full power by the wealth
of information stored in these, our nation's greatest treasure halls.

To even BEGIN to speak evil of libraries seems to me the greatest
sacrilege possible in a secular setting.

When Mr. Rump speaks of the "waste of human knowledge" I shudder.  It is
these people who have PRESERVED human knowledge!  Who have made our
hobby possible!  Librarians are often archivists rather than
disseminators so I can see his point, but we need to tread lightly.  We
walk on Holy Ground.

Mr. Rump goes on to discuss the problems, as he perceives them, and
repeatedly points fingers within the library system, comparing them to
incompetent government workers who point the finger elsewhere while
doing the same himself.  We won't solve this problem until we ALL see it
as OUR PROBLEM.  It isn't something that the librarians need to fix, it
is something that the communities need to fix.  Its OUR library.  They
just watch over it for us.  If we don't like the way they guard OUR
information, we need to work WITH them to change it.

One note, regarding boycotting publications that use tiered pricing.
Please don't destroy more of our information sources!  If you were a
publisher, would you sell a book that would be used by 100 people for
the same price as you would sell it to a single person?  Journals that
do so quickly become "the Former" Journal of XYZ.  Many of these
journals only have a circulation of 200-300 copies!  Reducing the price
would put them out of business, and our boycott would have destroyed the
resource we were seeking.  Yes, I read the Elsevier catalogs, and the
thousand dollar a year journals bother me, but not as greatly as their
absence if they are in a field I hold dear.

At our University we are well underway on a major library automation
project.  Our paper card catalogs are gone, and knowledge is now a
keystroke away, rather than having the frustration of searching through
countless drawers.  Any terminal on our campus has instant access, and
the library will have the book delivered to your office!  Books that
were impossible to find before are now coming to light and being used.

But this was not accomplished by "stating facts which may not sound
sweet", as Mr. Rump refers to his attacks on the library system.  This
was accomplished by having people not unlike ourselves, who understand
computer systems and their applications making proposals, doing
research, volunteering hundreds of hours, sitting through countless
meetings, and BEING WILLING TO HELP ANSWER QUESTIONS!  This is what you
can do for your library Mr. Rump.  Attend public hearings.  When you
learn that your library is considering automation, volunteer your time,
serve on a committee.  Rather than writing scathing letters to the
editor (and to us) that they spent three times what a business would
have spent for the same system, be there and protect them.  We found
quite early that we needed a computer-literate librarian, and the
position of "automation librarian" was created, and filled by a gifted
librarian who was knowledgeable in technical areas.

Your suggestions have merit, Mr. Rump.  Research them, develop them, and
if they are feasible, present them!  I have personally spent upwards of
thirty hours researching the idea you proposed of having journals
produced on CD-ROM and distributed in that manner.  Without the
commitment of a LARGE number of potential subscribers no publisher was
willing to take that step.  Scholarly journals have a much more limited
distribution than many of us realize, which is why Journals such as
"Pattern Recognition Letters" have outrageous prices like $552 for a
single year.  My research in this area is over a year old however, and
even in the last month new technologies have been emerging such as the
Philips CDD521 may help change that.  But last year the low-cost disk
writing to which you referred could only write on CDs that cost over $40
a piece, whereas the more expensive (>$100,000) systems could master a
glass disk, which could then stamp out copies for less than $2 a piece.
Whatever publisher went this route would either have to make a $100,000
initial investment, or stamp out $40 disks, which took over one hour a
piece to write, or send a 600MB tape of their system to be mastered
elsewhere, at an exorbitant cost.  Its not quite as easy as grabbing
your Scan Man and shooting out a CD version of every book in your
library.  I'd like to know more about how the current technology might
make this more feasible, if you have time to discuss it further offline.
The way I see it, there would have to be either a consortium of
publishers who agree to put multiple related journals on the same CD, or
a consortium of libraries, who agree to buy all titles in the series.

It could well be that libraries are not automating fast enough, or
efficiently, but if they are the holders of information, and we the
holders of technology, it does us little good to scoff at them for not
using our technological secrets, and it gets us the information no more
quickly.  We need to share the technology that we hold in a constructive
matter, for the merger will benefit us all.


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!  Later        +   Systems Programmer                                 !
!  Gary Warner  +   Samford University Computer Services               !
!               +   II TIMOTHY 2:15                                    !
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