Icebergs ahead

The article that made the most impact on me was Rick Anderson's "Away from the icebergs". In fact, it sort of freaked me out. I can't help thinking that sooner or later there will just be too much and the web... the google internet machine.... something... will just crash. And I know thats crazy but it still seems like its eventually going to happen. Rick Anderson says this specifically "Crazy as this may sound, the time has come for us to look skeptically at the very idea of a library “collection.” He says that his library has had a 55% decrease in circulation over the past 12 years and that everybody expects everything to be available online now. He says that it "no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get."

It drives me crazy now that when the computers go down for a day we tell stories about somebody actually 'using a book' to find the answer to a reference question as if its an urban legend or something. But that is apparently what things are coming to. Rick Anderson also says that we can no longer expect customers to come to us - we must come to them - whether virtually or otherwise. Ugh. I hate the idea of this. And its not that I want to go back to a time when we had to actually pull multiple reference books just to find a specific poem for a customer - but the satisfaction was definitely much much sweeter then just typing a line into google and having the answer pop up immediately. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm wistful for the past way of doing things and wary of the future (but hopeful as well) when it comes to libraries.

Technorati

More and more with this, I feel like I'm doing the exact same thing - just going about it from a different angle. Technorati is useful for searching and categorizing blogs if you want to read blogs about certain subjects. It has easy search capabilites and yet when I would type in a particular topic, I kept getting all kinds of completely unrelated things as well. But if you have a desire to read a bunch of blogs on one particular topic, I suppose Technorati is your man.

Del.icio.us AND fat-free

I don't know - again, I don't really get it. It seemed like a lot of the links were outdated and/or dead. I do understand how it could be useful for the library in theory, but in reality I just don't think I will use it. However, I did enjoy very much seeing the photo show of the librarian action figure. That was v. entertaining.