It was more than a year ago that Lorcan Dempsey pointed out this bit from The Chronicle:
Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library’s Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval.
These pictures are mostly foolish, but here’s a small point: none of us had ever seen a cop pull over a cab — certainly not a cab with passengers — before this, so we were all rather curious about why. In front of us stood a question, an example of the many questions we all encounter every day, and it’s the kind of question that few of us would ever suggest going to the library to answer.
November 28, 2005 – 8:49 am
Via Librarian Way I found the LiS Radio webcast of a conversation between Sandra Erdelez and Karen Fischer, two of three editors of Theories of Information Behavior from ASIS&T and Information Today.
Unfortunately, the interview focuses on how the book came to be more than the content, but the description reads:
overviews of more than 70 conceptual [...]
I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev.
In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or similar [...]
I love libraries, and I love books, but there the needs of our students and limitations of our budgets have no room for misplaced romantic attachments. That’s why I’ve found myself paraphrasing something from Ibiblio’s Paul Jones (via Teleread):
That smell of an old book, that smell of old libraries? That’s the smell of the books [...]
Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning):
…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content [...]
