Robert Darnton’s plangent discussion of the proposed Google Book Search agreement in the New York Review of Books was widely noticed. In particular, I was interested to read comments from the different perspectives of Paul Courant (University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, a major partner in the Google enterprise and a pioneer in creating and managing digital collections) and Tim O’Reilly (who has helped shape our view of the current network environment, and proponent of the interesting view that book search should be like web search).
The issues raised across these contributions are major and
Note: check out Robert Darnton’s Worldcat Identities page.
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So-called soft skills are hard
So-called soft skills are important across a range of library activities. Existing trends will further amplify this importance. Describing these skills as soft may be misleading, or even damaging. They should be recognized as learnable and teachable, and should be explicitly supported and rewarded.
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The Calgary central library was on first impression the finest public building I have been in for years.
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