One audience member noted a sense of a lack of information in the
midst of a world of abundance, of gaps in our knowledge of regions or subjects.
Prof. O'Donnell used Belgium as a metaphor for this information/resource
gap. If libraries in North America are not collecting materials on
Belgium, do we then build a specific collection on this continent,
or do we rely on the new technology of virtual access, linking bibliographic
records
to holdings in a number of libraries? While technological developments
would favor the latter approach, the recent destruction of libraries and
records in Bosnia and Kosovo points out how U.S. collections of these
materials have been especially valuable in reconstructing those lost in
the
former Yugoslavia.
An exchange of views about this theme followed:
Librarians need to do more than find out what scholars don't want and
then not collect it. Internet technology offers us the chance to
find materials well outside the home library. Alta Vista does a good
job of organizing the world of information. We need to rely more
on search algorithms than on concrete catalogs. On the other hand,
a world of bibliographic information does little good if someone doesn't
collect the item(s) in question. You can't find what no one has saved.
In an interesting conjunction, the Internet site www.about.com
promotes the idea of having humans actually doing the searching, finding,
gathering, and delivery. (O'Donnell provided a cautionary tale from
www.infoseek.com, showing a web index
gathering sites for medieval history that has inadvertently included a
parody article from a joke Festschrift O'Donnell and a colleague produced
for a beloved teacher 25 years ago and then put up on the web in 1995.)
In another vein, metadata records for web sites (an OCLC project) are in
effect, selection decisions, because they leave out some web sites while
indexing others.
In the electronic world, the persistence of identity will fade.
We already belong to a number of communities, interest groups, clubs. Inevitability
will always conflict with pragmatic advantage; linear identity will
give way to a multiplicity of personality. For instance, if a person
moves from
being a Communist to becoming a Republican, is there a common link
between those two mindsets?
In the sixteenth century, a learned man knew six books really well.
Today that person would be considered an idiot.