The End of Libraries?

[Vic Vega]

Do you think the day will come when libraries will be shut down because borrowing books is deemed an infringement of intellectual property laws?

The thought never entered my mind, till I saw what's going on in Congress nowadays with the massive lobbying to control all forms of media and companies patenting all sort of crap. and saying it's their intellectual property.

Even though it's not intellectual property related, we're already witnessing libraries having their funding cut and books, especially scholarly books, becoming too expensive for libraries to afford. Couple this with fewer people reading books, I don't think the future is too bright for libraries.

Nope.

 

[dmcowen674]

Mad Max

/thread

 

[0roo0roo]

The problem with libraries is the cost to fill them with books. Have you seen the cost of some books lately ? $30-$50 ? Then you have the people that never return books, or damage them, write in them, etc. What would be a better alternative in the future if tablets become mainstream is for kiosk to be put where libraries are now. Walk up to it, download the books you want and walk away.

Its not that much in the long run, books can cost that much, but they can also last decades. The majority of books last a long time, only get checked out occasionally, only a few popular titles will get worn to death or lost....those ones are probably more likely to be still in print and cheap to rebuy.

bigger downfall is libraries failing to fill their primary function...too many try to become cyber cafes and totally fall on their face in filling their shelves. the internets good for a lot of things but there are many subjects where books have far more knowledge than what you can find on the net. on a lot of things the net is jsut filled with ton of content generation spam, like how to do projects like gardening or carpentry, you are far better off with a book than finding out a thousand search results of how.com crap.

maybe they'll find a way to scan the things for digital, but its not going to be anytime soon, esp in color and high res which is part of the advantage of nice big books. also browsing is a huge problem in digital, there is no equivalent of browsing a shelf, the serendipity and frankly speed of browsing a bookshelf full of a subject just beats any online equivalent. sure you can find reviews faster online but they haven't solved the problem of being able to scan a shelf at a glance, and being able flip through a book on a whim.

 

[kranky]

Society will always need libraries because there is nothing like burning a library down to make sure everyone gets the message that you are serious about enforcing thought control.

I don't think that will even be necessary. Look at how many people think that having internet access replaces a library and/or newspapers. Frankly, it would serve the entrenched elite to have people believe that to be true, because it's a lot easier to control the internet in subtle ways than it is to control freedom of the press. Also makes it easy to rewrite history if there is no physical record of what happened.

It's been proven that while people may know how to search, they don't know how to evaluate the accuracy of what search turns up. If I was in the 1%, I would much rather people think they can get all the news they need from the internet than by reading newspapers, magazines or books.

With the state of newspapers today, the next Watergate will never become public knowledge. Newspapers can't afford to put top reporters on investigative stories for weeks and months at a time. Stories like that will stay buried.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

maybe they'll find a way to scan the things for digital, but its not going to be anytime soon, esp in color and high res

Google books does a wonderful job of digitizing everything it can; the only reason we don't have Google-digital everything is because of copy-write laws that serve only to hurt us today.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Google books does a wonderful job of digitizing everything it can; the only reason we don't have Google-digital everything is because of copy-write laws that serve only to hurt us today.

FYI, Google actually does a shitty job of scanning stuff. For example, they never scan anything that folds out of books, inserts, errata slips, etc. This is fine if you are just looking for a few pages here and there, but it means that serious researchers are largely unable to use their product.

 

[IGBT]

aclu will insist they stay open for p0rn.

 

[cybrsage]

Google books does a wonderful job of digitizing everything it can; the only reason we don't have Google-digital everything is because of copy-write laws that serve only to hurt us today.

Says a person who never wrote anything for sale, so never had their work stolen and not been paid for it.

Myopic.

 

[JACKHAMMER]

I don't want physical journal articles; they are inconvenient to search, copy, use, cite. I'm so much more upset when my university has a journal but it's in print than when it doesn't have it. Not having it means I can get a digital ILL, having it in print but not digital means I'm wasting a 1/2 hour of my life doing what I can do online in less than 1 min.

Spoken like a true college kid. We should pay more for continued and perennial access to save you half an hour. When your library has it, they have it - forever. Not until the online database shifts publishers and no longer carry it, or only have the 5 most recent years, but it will be available to students in 50 years. Let the library pay for it once instead of building it in to your tuition or my tax dollars.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Says a person who never wrote anything for sale, so never had their work stolen and not been paid for it.

Myopic.

Why would it be stolen? We don't need to have buildings full of dead-trees in order to have central accessible data center that pays the writer/editor. If anything all those buildings, people and dead threes are using funds that could have otherwise gone to content-creators. Further, the content of journals is already produced, for free, by a nearly all volunteer crew.

Never written anything for money, but I am writing a lot of stuff that I want people to read because I'm getting paid to do it... wait..

Spoken like a true college kid. We should pay more for continued and perennial access to save you half an hour. When your library has it, they have it - forever. Not until the online database shifts publishers and no longer carry it, or only have the 5 most recent years, but it will be available to students in 50 years. Let the library pay for it once instead of building it in to your tuition or my tax dollars.

Spoken like someone truly ignorant of the value of research.

If a professor is making 50k / year and needs 80 citations to write a paper you've saved 2240 HOURS, that's a full time job worth of time, PER PROFESSOR!. If the value to society of research is ONLY equal to what he's paid to produce it then this dinosaur waste of time that is stacks of dead trees is costing society at LOT.

Let's imagine ONLY bio, chem and engi profs are worth a damn and saving then 2240 hours per-paper only doubles their productivity. The BLS says there are 130,000 of these people. If they get paid an average of 50k/y then NOT allowing everything to have digital access is costing us 6.5 billion dollars in research man-hours per year.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Spoken like someone truly ignorant of the value of research.

If a professor is making 50k / year and needs 80 citations to write a paper you've saved 2240 HOURS, that's a full time job worth of time, PER PROFESSOR!. If the value to society of research is ONLY equal to what he's paid to produce it then this dinosaur waste of time that is stacks of dead trees is costing society at LOT.

Let's imagine ONLY bio, chem and engi profs are worth a damn and saving then 2240 hours per-paper only doubles their productivity. The BLS says there are 130,000 of these people. If they get paid an average of 50k/y then NOT allowing everything to have digital access is costing us 6.5 billion dollars in research man-hours per year.

That is a model that has no chance of happening within our lifetime. The current academic publishing model is not a particularly profitable one. Sure, there is some profit in it, but most of revenue is eaten up by expenses. These expenses are in the form of those wonderful databases that allow you to actually FIND stuff.

You model seems to be based on the following:
1. The existing publishing model will cease to exist and all academic work will go into a central database NOT maintained by libraries
2. The central database NOT maintained by libraries will be both more effective than the existing library databases and be funded through some other means
3. The quantity and quality of knowledge that is produced will increase or stay the same as a result.

Is this accurate?

By the way, some of us actually are heavily involved with both libraries and original research and are very well aware of both its costs and value.

 

[JACKHAMMER]

Spoken like someone truly ignorant of the value of research.

If a professor is making 50k / year and needs 80 citations to write a paper you've saved 2240 HOURS, that's a full time job worth of time, PER PROFESSOR!. If the value to society of research is ONLY equal to what he's paid to produce it then this dinosaur waste of time that is stacks of dead trees is costing society at LOT.

Let's imagine ONLY bio, chem and engi profs are worth a damn and saving then 2240 hours per-paper only doubles their productivity. The BLS says there are 130,000 of these people. If they get paid an average of 50k/y then NOT allowing everything to have digital access is costing us 6.5 billion dollars in research man-hours per year.

You make me giggle. I am published kiddo. In fact, I actively do research too! In a science field! I have also been called professor in my time as well. My field is a small one, and the journals are not carried by many of the databases. So, I understand full well the limitations of digital libraries. My original point remains, the carriers of these databases are in it to make money (AFAIK) and routinely dump journals that they used to carry for various reasons. If the university library did't have physical copies of those, I would never be able to get them. And BTW, when I worked at a college, I had grad students go to the library for me.

 

[cybrsage]

Libraries should have both digital and hard copies. Digital for each of searching, hard copies for posterity and longevity.

EDIT: They also have to exist so the youngsters of the future can find out what an old man is...