Will Libraries Survive?

[gszeliga <gszeliga@STNY.LRUN.COM>]

Read an interesting article today that I found through "Current Cites".  It
was entitled "Will Libraries Survive?".  It was wriTten by Geoffrey Nunberg,
a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and teacher of
linguistics at Stanford University.

I especially liked the section below ....


Excerpt from  Geoffrey Nunberg, "Will Libraries Survive," The American
Prospect no. 41 (November-December 1998): 16-23
(http://epn.org/prospect/41/41nunb.html).


.....But there’s an even better reason for making libraries the mediators of
public access to electronic information: in a word, librarians. When you
listen to the visions of cyberspace painted by Gore, IBM, and many others
you sometimes have the feeling of a place where a neutron bomb has gone
off—of endless rows of cyberstacks where never a virtual footstep falls. But
if there is one thing that distinguishes networked computers from print, it
is how   support-intensive they are at every turn, not just because of the
demands of machine and system maintenance, but because people need help in
finding what they are looking for in the labyrinth of the Web—and often,in
the absence of common document standards, in simply getting it to display on
a screen. Anyone who works in an office or university setting is painfully
aware of these difficulties, but the problems are even more pressing for
library patrons, who tend to be inexperienced users and who don’t have
friends or colleagues handy on whom they can call.
-------------------------------------
Name: gszeliga
E-mail: gszeliga <gszeliga@stny.lrun.com>
Date: 11/30/98
Time: 7:48:41 PM

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