Because technology has changed that they are now obsolete and a better, cheaper version is available.
However, something tells me, like the Post Office, we are going to be forced to slave away for unneeded, but highly unionized and politically influential obsoletes osuch as postal workers and librarians.
This is well and fine if your goal of a library is out of copyright books and pop culture trash. I just bought out a section of a state college library and I have encountered vast numbers of periodicals relevant to my state which are produced by defunct organizations from the 1950's to the 2010's.
ReplyDeleteThe big point to make is these repositories would not exist and lost to time thanks to copyright issues. Until copyrights are reformed libraries can and will serve this purpose.
Rubbish. There will always be a need for a physical place to act as a repository of knowledge, and as a venue for learned interaction. You feel uncomfortable with this...I get that.
ReplyDeleteSTOP. READING. MY. MIND ...
ReplyDeleteand stealing my ideas ;)
I've been saying for years that if you really are concerned that kids won't read w/o libraries, just give them a kindle w/amazon prime. It would be much cheaper.
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
ReplyDelete--Thomas Carlyle
As the internet is the greatest collection of books and other readings, the library is obsolete. Books that are held in copyright by their authors or their heirs deserve obscurity. The books one needs to read are all pre-copyright anyway.
"Rubbish. There will always be a need for a physical place to act as a repository of knowledge, and as a venue for learned interaction. You feel uncomfortable with this...I get that."
ReplyDeleteYour jimmies are rustled.
Respectfully, I must half disagree. While publicly funded libraries have, in the main, become the daytime refuge of various "free riders", privately funded libraries (Andrew Carnegie's come to mind) educated generations.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Bill G would be as hot to buy Kindles as he is to buy mosqito nets....
Steamship Trooper
Libraries are decent places for upwardly mobile homeless people. They take better to books than flashy electronics too.
ReplyDeleteThe library is a social place as well, more often than not when people say something is obsolete because of technology, they're overlooking the fact that humans are still social creatures that like to be around others...the library serves as such a place among others.
ReplyDeleteNonsense on stilts. I liken using a computer to find information like using the biggest library in the world ... through a service hatch.
ReplyDeleteAs a dance instructor, I would have thought you'd be more open to the need for a haptic interaction with the source material.
Curation of knowledge is not a province of a google alogorithim, it is harder to physically remove all copies of a book than to return a 404 error, and the NSA cannot look at what you browse in the stacks.
This is where your opinion now becomes worthless to me.
ReplyDeleteI disagree. Libraries should be privately owned, even the ones sort of open to the public. This is because even if you are trying to serve socioeconomically disadvantaged people, what you want to do is have a decent inventory and wait for that tiny percentage of folks who actually want to learn something to show up. What happens with public libraries is that, in lieu of an owner/philanthropist (or profit from subscription) they like to point at circulation stats. In order to get circulation stats to rise, they buy crap that the lowest common denominator types like.
ReplyDeleteA proper library is a place for self-directed learning. Some of us can us the internet that, but there are poor people who can't, or won't because they get stuck on facebook. There are also wealthier people, like a doctor who once told me he hates googling things because he can end up wasting six hours trying to find an answer to his question. I think finding the quality stuff on the internet and then bringing it to the local public is part of the future for libraries, if they ever get off the left wing 'relevance' kick.
Paper is not yet obsolete. It cannot be memory-holed, deleted, erased via DMCA take-down, or de listed from search engines.
ReplyDeleteIt cannot be retroactively 'adjusted to fit the current truth'.
Paper survives for decades, centuries if well kept.
It requires no electronics, or electricity.
And while I've said it before, I'll say it again.
It cannot be changed. I can't impress just how important this is.
I told a librarian acquaintance of mine that while I loved libraries, because I love real books, I believed, with regret, that they would be gone soon, felled by the popularity and availability of ebooks and ereaders.
ReplyDeleteShe said that she believed they would survive because they are modernizing and adding computers and digital books themselves.
I don't know if she's right or wrong, but I hope libraries survive.
And then there's stuff like this:
ReplyDeletehttp://robertbast.com/carrington-level-events/
Libraries as shit-it-the-fan insurance. Well, my kind of libraries. There's no point in going to a leftist library during the apocalypse. You won't glean many survival skills from the paranormal erotica.
I'm going to disagree on this one Aaron. Libraries do have a function: as a place to quietly absorb information without being bothered by pesky siblings and screaming babies.
ReplyDeleteFurther, it will be a long time before everything manages to become completely digitised.
Finally, we in the computer industry have yet to ensure absolutely reliable long-term storage. Our backup technologies completely change every 3-5 years, trying to restore from a 10-20yo tape is often a mission in futility.
Even the LOCKSS system is only a half-assed method of doing it, and that was designed to keep archival records for libraries.
Libraries are nice; we can't afford them. I was at a county board meeting, where the Director said "Do we want to be the type of county that doesn't have a planetarium?" to vigrous head nodding. A citizen went to the mic to say "I don't want us to be a county with a planetarium. I want us to be a county next to a county that has a planetarium."
ReplyDeleteSame idea applies to libraries.
Libraries are dying because librarians are populists who need to fill space with Harry Potter if they are to get sufficient bums in chairs and stay employed. Collections of books for reference are not seen as necessary not because of the internet but as being elitist. The laughable part of their efforts to capture and contain knowledge by being gate-keepers is their willingness to supply movies, CD's and computer stations. Individuals cane choose to do that with their own money. Public subidzing is no longer needed.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise they become public daytime housing with toilets and showers.