shimenawa - Latest comments on Who preserves?

In response to: Who preserves?

pbrantley [Member] — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:11:32 +0000

Adam -

Yes, I am an avid fan of Snow Crash (particularly, less so his other works). I appreciate your comments, and agree there is almost an inexorable trajectory to them. That's why I think libraries need - with some desparation - to find an adjacent niche to occupy that might leave them with something other than glorious cabinets of high value curios. I f we do not, then the place for us in the future will be smaller, still transformed, still useful, but much much smaller.

In response to: Who preserves?

Adam Corson-Finnerty [Visitor] — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 10:59:21 +0000

I appreciate your taking this on in a forthright manner, and advocating for a "public" effort to address the problem of preservation. I assume that you are envisioning a concerted effort by libraries, backed by foundation and government monies, but also in partnership with commercial publishers who deposit material and share the ongoing cost of maintenance and data migration. This sounds good to me!
However, there is a counterforce to this seemingly (probably) logical position.
To me, the counterforce is best presented by Neil Stephenson in his book Snow Crash. Way before Google, way before The Long Tail, Stephenson imagined that corporations would suck up every bit of information that they could get their hands on, even the most ephemeral, and feed it back to the public at a price. Massive storage and sophisticated data-mining would allow even the most obscure bit of "intel" to have value. For example, videos of the audiences at rock concerts become useful in crime-solving through face-recognition software.
Amusingly, or ironically, Stephenson imagines that this vast database is accessed through a virtual, holographic, personality. You can verbally engage this personality in real-time consultation. The personality is called "The Librarian."
Having read the book, it is frightening to see Google and its competitors following the very path that Snow Crash envisions. Even so, I think we must consider whether the combined force of commercialism, plus the "Moores' Law" force of technological change (more, cheaper, faster) means that every scrap of information will be digitized and sucked up, and fed back to us at an incredibly cheap price. So cheap that it undermines any public effort to compete.
In other words, I am making the argument that we librarians are doomed from the start.
There are many counter-arguments to the assertion that I just made, but let me leave it out there and see if anyone (hopefully including you) bites on it.

In response to: Who preserves?

Michael A Keller [Visitor] — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:58:30 +0000

Peter,
Your opening paragraph includes a conflation of some of the NLM services. Medline is the large and useful database of bio-medical journal citations. PubMed is the version of Medline available through the web directly and through other service providers. PubMed Central is a digital archive of some journal articles in various states arising from NIH-sponsored research.