Isn’t it time we called a spade a spade and accept that publishing is a skill just as librarianship is a skill just as running a business is a skill. What makes you good at one is no guarantee of success in one of the others. However attractive it might seem, publishers would likely make bad librarians and vice versa.

why not stop arguing, find some common ground and make up a better system? not talking but just shouting at each other is a guaranteed way of maintaining the status quo

In the past month or so I’ve been in meetings where our librarians (for the past 15-20 years) got a revelation that there is need to make the library relevant to campus research in the sciences and surprise surprise no one has a background in sciences! Even our most recent hires just have an MLS with a basic liberal arts BA. When they’ve spoken to science librarians they come out of those encounters as “oh well these people have PhDs as well as an MLS! we can’t compete” The consequence is that there is a deficiency on campus with people being deer in headlights saying “how could this happen?”

Another (of the many) incidents was in one of our archives. They got some of their collections online but the descriptive metadata is super basic. If the item is a picture with a frame, you have a basic description of the frame, and a very basic description of the photo. No additional info on the original, what the photo is about, people in it, what they are doing, information about the rituals…A good start toward digitization but information wise…poor

It’s kind of like my problem with Questioner over the Reference desk problem; I have now finally remembered WHY I have so much disdain for Reference librarians. In that case, the librarians gave me a bit of random trivia and an answer. I looked it up; all that answer is, is another large database built by librarians closely emulating the current MARC structure. Now where are the images of the actual items? where is an anotated image that has been fully analyzed for details that are used to distinguish this piece form later pieces? Where is an annotated image of a fake reproduction and the ways those interested in this hobby can tell a fake form the real thing? Where are the holdings list that shows all the communities that hold one of these rare treasures? Where is the INFORMATION that the new 21st Century actually uses???

Take a guess how researchers and particularly scientists, who relay on datasets, view the library and PARTICULARLY the Librarians pretending to be kowledgeable about their subject! [By the way, you may take datasets out of the journals and put them in a digital file with only the article citation and that IS covered under fair use!]

Piled deeper and Highers view Librarians as having a status below that of their undergraduate students. When these lirbrarians say they know somethign about the subject, these Ph.Ds smile and happily entertain this notion, as one would entertain an amatuer in any skill on this planet.

If the library TRUELY served the science communities on the Academic campuses as well as they say they do, then they would have every single dataset in their vast collection of print journals in the computer. Every article would be fully annotated to the nines. Today most librains wold complain that there is too much old meaningless journals to do such work; and who reads articles from 1967, anyways?? [I'll have you know that in some fields there is a huge demand for articles from earlier ears, depending on the developments of that period.] If every academic library with a print subscription HAD been doing this, there would be NO CONTEST for libraries today.

Scientists do not expect librarians to know ANYTHING about the materials – they expect librarians to properly archive it and make it available for their use On Demand in a manner that is fitting for the times.

For some reason librarins declared they could not do the work. And now scientists buy their reference materials from a variety of vendors and give the library a middle finger and an E or F for failure to provide information resources that are as advanced in the field of informaiton as their work is advanced in theirs, respectively.

Instead…well, welcome to being Second to Last…

Librarians are going to have to learn how to play hardball politics. You see where we got being nice and playing pushover, yes? Our budgets keep getting cut and the cendors keep scalping us another slice off the top.

If all the libraries cut their subscriptions, places like Elsevier would croak. They’re sitting on millions of debt from their aquisition sprees. At this point, a huge deficit in revenue five or ten years in a row would effectivley send these companies to recievership. Now if we get to the point where that debt is gone, we’re REALLY screwed. I suggest Library directors wise up and wise up fast.