The Internet! Bah

A friend of a friend posted a link yesterday to an op-ed from 1995. I will quote:
"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

I wrote back to my friend "That guy must feel like such a doofus."

Well, turns out he does...this is an excerpt of what he thinks of his article now:
"Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play...Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em. Heck - trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven...
And, as I've laughed at others' foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.
Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff...
Warm cheers to all,
-Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"

Cliff Stoll's embarrassment is probably a message to us all. Whenever I think about the new future of cataloging, I have the tendency to think "RDA? FRBR? Bah." Mostly this is due to a fear of the unknown, and a general dislike of people who are optimists. I am not an optimist. I am more of a...raging bulldozer of pessmism. Seeing that there were 300 people at the RDA class, though, gives me pause. Maybe we'll really do this thing. Maybe someday, library catalogs will be the most usable and efficient way of finding information that the Web has to offer. And we'll all understand how metadata is generated and actually *appreciate* what it means to generate all that metadata. And I'll have my own pony.

Sorry. My optimism got away from me for a second. I mean, I'll have my own brain-implanted internet access chip.

Technology Fail

I would say something about Chris Oliver's talk yesterday on RDA and it's relationships to FRBR and our current database environments, but unfortunately, our internet went down half an hour into her presentation. Hurray, technology! Once again underscoring the fragile nature of the digital world. If I were reading a book by her, all I would need is a relatively light-filled day. So, screw you, computers.

To copyright or not to copyright

First, the FRBR blog linked to me the other day. It was not especially complimentary, but, there you are. I can't always be thought right. I agree totally that the work being done on FRBR is changing it, though. So we can all agree on that.

Also, I was reading First thus this morning. He posted some things about how copyright law is stuck in the past, and how it's not helping anyone that you can't do anything with digital versions of books except read them. You can't loan them (because such a thing does not currently exist, apparently), you can't copy them, nothing, without infringing on the copyright.

But something about that post irks me. Yes, there are lots of rules with regards to copying digital files and distributing them. Yes, the system seems to be broken in many respects. But what can we actually DO about it? Saying that librarians will be sitting on the sidelines doesn't seem like a very productive way to start effecting change. Maybe as a whole, yes, librarians may end up on the sidelines of the policy debate, but as individual citizens, no one is wholly without the means to make change in this world. Especially librarians.

PDA

I was posting yesterday about public libraries, and I've been reading about the Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA) model. Apparently this model is kind of a huge and headachey success, and so it's sort of a problem to figure out how exactly libraries want to proceed with it. It's expensive on the one hand, and also so wildly successful that it sort of defies any attempts to get rid of it once it's in place.
For the project I'm working on, we're talking about building libraries in third world countries, in places where there is not a book culture already present. Or at least not for many people. In this kind of scenario, I think that the PDA model will actually work very nicely. You don't have thousands of undergrads, or even hundreds of public library patrons, banging down the door for their chance to print out their own books. I imagine that the acquisitions would happen more slowly, as people get used to the idea that it's even possible to have on-demand books streaming to you on the web.
I'm not an acquisitions librarian, nor a reference librarian, and so I'm not really very knowledgeable about this aspect of libraries. Catalogers usually just take what we're given, and we make it available and hope for the best. This is definitely a new adventure.