Via Slashdot, I learn that the president of the American Library Association has discovered bloggers, and he thinks they are B-A-D NEWS. And not bad-meaning-good, either. It seems that this piece was the result of a flame war, which in turn was the result of an editorial he wrote which was critical of Google's library digitalization project.
His sins against bloggery multiply in this piece...My piece had the temerity to question the usefulness of Google digitizing millions of books and making bits of them available via its notoriously inefficient search engine... Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.
Those characteristics are ignored and excused by those who think that Google is the creation of "God's mind," because it gives the searcher its heaps of irrelevance in nanoseconds. Speed is of the essence to the Google boosters, just as it is to consumers of fast "food," but, as with fast food, rubbish is rubbish, no matter how speedily it is delivered.
In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.
How could I possibly be against access to the world's knowledge? Of course, like most sane people, I am not against it and, after more than 40 years of working in libraries, am rather for it. I have spent a lot of my long professional life working on aspects of the noble aim of Universal Bibliographic Control—a mechanism by which all the world's recorded knowledge would be known, and available, to the people of the world. My sin against bloggery is that I do not believe this particular project will give us anything that comes anywhere near access to the world's knowledge.
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.")
and
It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.
What on earth is he going on about? This is a great deal of bile over a pointless argument which was started... why, exactly?
I use Google many times a day, and I have no recollection of their
mission
statement saying anything about destroying all the books and libraries,
or destroying
the written word. It's a tool, based on technology, and naturally
enough, the
Google folks want to see how far they can take it. There is a
conversation to
be had about the dangers of a public library being coopted by the
private domain,
and a conversation to be had about the pitfalls in trying to preserve
digital
information, but he's not having that conversation. He's having a
rant.
Meanwhile this guy wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, he complains about the massive amounts of crap information available in cyberspace. Yet when a company attempts to put massive amounts of authoritative information online, he still has a problem with it.
I have no doubt that many of the people who responded to his snotty editorial (and it was snotty) were really rude. But to dismiss the whole blogosphere makes no sense. It's like dismissing every journalist because of Jeff Gannon (OK, so that's happening) or every professor because of Ward Churchill (OK, so that's happening too...). Who blogs? Lots of people who can't really write very well, true. But also: journalists. Professors. Legal experts. Published nonfiction authors. The website is only as good as the brain behind it. The web and the blog are publishing mediums, just with different technologies and time frames.
Personally, as a literature major who loves books (and owns way too many of them), and as a graduate of what used to be a library school, as a person who makes her living on the web, who relies heavily on Google and whose office is filled with paper, I think this guy is full of it.
But I do have to thank the author for making it even clearer than ever
why
I should join the Special
Library
Association and not the American Library Association!
