Becky Hines, our medical librarian colleague expanded on an idea we shared over coffee in her blog TheScreenIsFlat.org,

Are we are still trying to control the data and expecting users to utilize data in the ways in which we have organized? I’m not suggested that Librarians get out of the game of offering expertise in the area of knowledge management, research, or scholarship. Its just that I wonder if our attempts to control how and from where the data will be used is really just a game of herding cats.

I think this is one of the key issues facing libraries and other information rich institutions (aka universities). Is our role to be web developers and try to predict the next big Web 3.0 trend? Or is our role as custodian to work with our data so that it is easily accessible by our users?

In other words, if we’re in the retail pizza business, should we build cars so our customers can drive to our shop and pick up pizza? Or, do we make really great pizza and then concentrate our efforts on being accessible ?

Tags: library

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Fritz writes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.