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Home Front: Culture Wars
Library Man Fears Attack of the Blog People!!!
2005-02-25
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain like my back hair, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about anything other than lunch blogs or Blog People.

McGoogle
I had heard of the activities of the latter and of the absurd idea of giving them press credentials (though, since the credentials were issued for political conventions, they were just absurd icing on absurd cakes)
either Library Man doesn¡¯t know where to find a thesaurus...hint, try the reference section....or he just wanted to use the word to describe something other than his immediate family.
I was not truly aware of them until shortly after I published an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times ("Google and God's Mind," December 17, 2004). Then, thanks to kind friends with nothing but my welfare in mind, I rapidly learned more about the blog subcultures.
Dammit, he's on to us!!

My piece had the temerity to question the usefulness of Google digitizing millions of books and making bits of them available via its notoriously inefficient search engine. The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.
Apparently Library Man didn't like what came up when he hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button

Digitized books
Those characteristics are ignored and excused by those who think that Google is the creation of "God's mind," because it gives the searcher its heaps of irrelevance in nanoseconds. Speed is of the essence to the Google boosters, just as it is to consumers of fast "food," but, as with fast food, rubbish is rubbish, no matter how speedily it is delivered.

In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that I am not a walking joke Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.

How could I possibly be against access to the world's knowledge?
Because the way they are accessing it hasn't been around for fifty years?
Of course, like most sane people, I am not against it and, after more than 40 years of working in libraries and never getting a date with ANY hot librarian chicks, am rather for it. I have spent a lot of my long professional life crying out for any attention at all working on aspects of the noble aim of Universal Bibliographic Control mechanism by which all the world's recorded knowledge would be known, and available, to the people of the world. My sin against bloggery is that I do not believe this particular project will give us anything that comes anywhere near access to the world's knowledge.
"If it can't be perfect, why do it?"

Who are the Blog People?
It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of my advanced case of rectal cranial insertion what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts.
Hmm...I'm reading the Anglosphere Challenge... didn't know it was "easy reading."
It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.

At least two of the blog excerpts sent to me (each written under pseudonyms) come from self-proclaimed "conservatives," which I find odd because many of the others come from people who call me a Luddite and are, presumably, technology-obsessed progressives. The Luddite label is because my mild remarks have been portrayed as those of someone worried about the job security of librarians (I am not and I'm holding my breath until you take that back, you meanie!) rather than one who has a different point of view on the usefulness of this latest expression of Google hubris and vast expenditure of money involved.

I'm no Antidigitalist I play with myself all the time! If a fraction of the latter were devoted to buying books and providing librarians for the library-starved children of California, the effort would be of far more use to humanity and society.
You just knew there was gonna be some "give me money!" pitch, didn't you?
Perhaps that latter thought will reinforce the opinion of the Blog Person who included "Michael Gorman is an idiot" in his reasoned critique, because no opinion that comes from someone who is "antidigital" (in the words of another Blog Person) could possibly be correct. For the record, though I may have associated with Antidigitalists, I am not and have never been a member of the Antidigitalist party and would be willing to testify to that under oath. I doubt even that would save me from being burned at the virtual stake, or, at best, being placed in a virtual pillory to be pelted with blogs its always been being placed in a pillory to be pelted with books by hot librarian chicks!. Ugh!
Posted by:Desert Blondie

#6  He seemed so... French. But apparently he's not:
http://mg.csufresno.edu/biography.htm
Posted by: Tom   2005-02-25 6:40:46 PM  

#5  

Oh, Library man...library man:

BEWARE - - -
WE ARE THERE!
Posted by: BigEd   2005-02-25 5:58:56 PM  

#4  In contrast, check out the Information Science & Policy PhD program at SUNY Albany. It's co-owned by the old library school, the comp sci department, the business school and the Rockafeller Public Policy school.

They're doing it right, and some of their doctoral students are experienced librarians.
Posted by: Robin Burk   2005-02-25 12:47:09 PM  

#3  I kinda feel sorry for the ol' dinosaur. His little world (arranged and cataloged by subject, author or title) has fallen apart since the Huns have invaded publishing.
Posted by: 2b   2005-02-25 12:06:15 PM  

#2  I also looked at some of his toilet papers. He seems to talk a lot in circles, and say very little. We are not encountering a man in search of ideas, more like it seems we are encountering ideas in search of a man. Yeech...
Posted by: BigEd   2005-02-25 11:55:19 AM  

#1  the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar

I sense someone who couldn't get laid with $10,000, ten pounds of coke, and a tanker full of Jack Daniels.

I especially liked his "I'm not just worried about the jobs of librarians" line, since two sentences later he's whining that private money won't be going to pay for more librarians.

Oh, and check out the "platform" under which he ran for president of the ALA. My favorite point is the second:

Lead the opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act, any extension of such laws and regulations, and any further infringement on the rights of library users


In other words, he thinks librarians shouldn't have to obey a subpoena like the rest of us.

Then there are his recent "papers":

"The value and values of libraries"

"Authority Control in the Context of Bibliographic Control in the Electronic Environment"

"How the English See the French, a Personal View"

"A profession that looks like America?"

Three of them are political; the only technical one relates to a system described by a Slashdot poster as (in essence) a massive card-catalog. Gorman's beef with Google's plan isn't just that the money isn't going to hire albino Asian transgendered librarians, but that it's taking away from his pet project.

Oh, and that Google would actually let you READ THE CONTENT of the material; his system would say, "Oh, you want to read this dozen books for that subject. None of them are in your local library, but if you wait four to six months, they might become available through interlibrary loan."

Here's a book he co-wrote, explaining a decade ago how electronic libraries are bad for us.

And -- no shit -- he's given multiple speeches titled "Whither library education?"

Yet another academic convinced that his "discipline" is the end-all and be-all of human progress. If he were any more full of himself, he'd explode.
Posted by: Robert Crawford   2005-02-25 10:26:06 AM  

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