Subscribe to Site Feed

what's new f.a.q about us feedback

history women portraits mythology

arts music culture paintings

tags sitemap timeline index a-z

pictures! stamps erotica biographies

gandhi tribals temples religions

 

Best of AnthoBLOGy • Unripe Revolution • Rooster's Dharma • Don't Know Jack • No Love for Condi • Blogger's Block • Father of the Bride • TinTin's Diary - I • TinTin's Diary II • Hate Bollywood • Child Labor • M.F.Husain Guilty •Marathi & Konkani • Artist's Daughter • India's First IT Guru

Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat

Notes from Library Conference

Notes from ALA MidWinter Meeting I attended the American Library Association's meeting in Boston, hoping to learn new developments in digital library technologies. Some observations. Every Tom, Dick, Harry, Pete, and Steve how want to make money from the Internet, and everybody is offering what they call "Online Research Tools", and "Online Portals", and everybody has the same mantra --"federated search", "link to full text", and "usage statistics". I asked "Open Access" gurus about value additions to open-access content -- like Open Access Research Databases, independent abstracts and reviews of OA papers, and they seem to be clueless. All they could tell me was "independently compiled abstracts and reviews are not original research and falls the outside the scope of OA movement." Great. The vendor showcases are boring. I have been to several trade shows, the library shows are the worst. The most important person in library business (the researcher) had no representation. You better believe in the stereotype librarian. They really are like that. Whereas every vendor I spoke to was shivering with fear that their offerings are about to become history, the biggest players in the content and search business (Google and Yahoo) were completely absent. The librarians are still chanting "info on the web not reliable" mantra. Hello! I asked every vendor in electronic content business how are they going to know a patron (a reader in the library) has access to a particular content (electronic music, electronic book, research paper etc) and they are seem to rely on the librarian to tell them that (as if the librarians have no other work). Anyway how does the librarian know what I bought on iTunes or Amazon?! (Comments Disabled for Now. Sorry!) First Written: Monday, January 17, 2005 Last Modified: 1/19/2005 5:19:15 PM

Browse More Entries

About Me:

• My Home Page
• Contact me
• Kamat Family Album

Powered  NOT by Blogger or MovabaleType or WordPress, but by SimplyBlog, a software I wrote to create blogs. See details of implementation or download SimplyBlog.