Library Babel Fish

We increasingly depend on companies whose business is collecting information about us – what we read, what we say, what we watch, what we buy, where we go, and who we know. It’s scary how much the tools that we use every day capture and use personal information - and how little we care. But perhaps that will soon change. Both Facebook and Google will be revealing some of the astounding amount of information they’ve gathered about us, and it may make people uncomfortable enough to stir things up.

It's a sign of the times. Long before my copy of the New York Times arrived Sunday morning I had read tweets and blog posts responding to an article in their occasional Education Life section. Though it somewhat defeats the purpose of having a newspaper delivered to your door, on Saturday I found myself looking for the online incarnation of the article that sparked responses, Matt Richtel's "Delete Term Paper, Enter Blogging: To Raves and Rants, the Digital Medium Muscles in on a Tradition" or, as it's slugged online, "Blogs vs. Term Papers."

The People have sustained libraries longer than the companies that legislate against libraries and the Internet have been in existence. There is no reason we can't spend our money differently to sustain a model that respects openness and sharing to advance knowledge for all - if we choose to.

Last week, two things were peppering my Twitter stream – posts about digital humanities from scholars attending the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association annual conferences mingled with expressions of concern and outrage over the introduction of the Research Works Act, a bill supported by the publishing association to which both associations belong. It just dawned on me (duh) that these two issues are a perfect demonstration of the collision course we’re on.

Joshua Kim raised an interesting question on Tuesday. In just an hour, he was able to get a whole bunch of books and chose among formats for preference and price. The fact that Amazon makes it insanely easy to buy books – but makes it difficult or impossible to share them (thanks in large part to publishers) leads him wonder about the dominance of Amazon and the impact on libraries. If Amazon is able to instantly satisfy those who can afford to buy all of their books, will those happy shoppers opt out of supporting libraries? Are libraries, crippled by publisher restrictions, becoming unattractive options by design?

I have been thinking about my last post in which (taking a leaf from Mark Bauerlein) I questioned the emphasis we put on quantity of peer-reviewed publications as the primary determinant of who will be recognized as a scholar worthy of tenure. Publications become a kind of currency traded for a safe job – a currency that is suffering from inflation.

Mark Bauerlein’s recent critique of the scholarly habit of producing a voluminous amount of research in literary studies that is rarely cited has prompted a number of responses.

Last week, I found myself fascinated by Tim Sherrat’s observation that interfaces are sites of power. Similarly, the architecture of a library says a lot to its users about the position they hold in the realm of knowledge, as visitors, consumers, or as members of a discipline or a tradition.