I figured a few of you might have missed this due to the ALA Conference, Canada Day or July 4th, so I am re-posting it as most of you return to work for July:
What librarians & Google are for…
via Phil Bradley’s weblog by philipbradley on 28/06/11
“What librarians & Google are for…
Librarians are there:
To help, aid, assist. To teach, collate, enthuse. To catalogue, index, arrange, organise. To find, discover, promote, display. To interest, intrigue, amuse and amaze. To instill wonder. To help children, adults, old people, the underprivileged, the rich, the poor, those with voices and those without. To protect resources, to archive them, to store them, to save them for the future. To provide differing viewpoints, to engender thought, conversation, research, fun. To provide the best answer possible, to match the answer to the enquirer, to provide just enough information without overwhelming the user, but enough to always help. To better a local community, a company, a school, a college, an organisation, a country, the world.
Google is there:
To make money.”
As usual, Phil nails it.
Stephen
5 Responses
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Thank you Stephen. You’re very kind, and praise from you is praise indeed.
So…librarians DON’T make money? We do the work we do for free?
And Google ONLY makes money? They don’t offer a valuable service that hundreds of millions of people use?
A keen awareness of the self-serving behavior of others should always be paired with a similar insight into the self-serving behavior of ourselves.
Steve: I certainly see a huge difference between salaries and profit. Google employees make a salary and librarians make a salary. Corporations exist to make monetary profits and libraries exist for the social good. I see huge differences in the underlying motivations and business models for publicy held business and tax supported public institutions. Conflating and confusing the two realms is surely not helpful and labelling the discussion self-serving is not insightful.
SA
Stephen: Corporations exist to provide a monetary profit, yes, but in most cases they provide a useful service in exchange for that profit (Google certainly does). Libraries exist for the social good, yes, but in most cases they increase real estate values for ratepayers and provide elected officials with a feel-good service to tout at election time.
Many librarians have a Manichean view of public service versus private profit in which we are the people of light and they are the people of darkness, and I do see that distinction as self-serving (and several other things as well). It’s a counterproductive way of understanding the world in which libraries operate, of understanding the different strengths and capabilities of different kinds of organizations, and of understanding ourselves and our own motivations.
As someone who works with thousands of librarians in the for profit space, I agree that it doesn’t help to demonize profits in black and white terms. Both libraries and Google are mostly fee to end users. Then again, I don’t think that such a lack of differentiation between Google and libraries is good. Profit drives Google to have special interest groups (like politicians, commercial interests, racist organizations, etc.) to use their SEO, SMO, adwords, content farms, etc. to change the search results for special purposes. Libraries don’t permit and encourage that to happen with their licensed databases and catalogues. Then again, we’re not making billions in net profit every 30 days. That’s a powerful motivator to collect social information with Google+ and the oppositie of library views of card privacy and confidentiality. As Phil started this conversation, there are big differences.
SA