I have been reading a lot about Library 2.0 recently. This is a new direction in libraries of which blogging, wikis and XML are a part. The idea behind much of these innovations in web 2.0 where social networking and blogs and websites which can be commented on and changed by anyone. It can also include increasing amounts of digital resources.
Obviously as someone who has a blog, I embrace many aspects of web 2.0. I even like the fact that digital e-books can be purchased by our main librarian and all three campuses can use them. Periodical indexes have been revolutionized since I was in college, to the degree that we don;'t even need to offer ILL of articles anymore.
However, I still get many students who prefer the look and feel of a real book in the hands. For one thing, they can be checked out for free rather than printed out for a cost. The thick bulk of the book also adds to the perception of reliability, whether or not correctly placed.
I read an article today about openlibrary.org, an amazing site devoted to creating a webpage for every single book in existence, eventually. There will be places for reader comments, links to other works by the same author and other amazing features. It could truly turn out to be an amazing resource. But it took my computer several minutes to load and then thirty seconds each time I turned a page. It will be a wonderful resource for books you can;'t get your hands on any other way. But if the physical book is just a few shelves away, I will pick it up and be engrossed in another world in ten seconds. Until the internet is as easy to turn on as a book, there will still be a place for both.
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2 comments:
Part of the problem with openlibrary might be bandwidth. If only a scanned image exists, and they used grayscale JPEG, it means the image is hundreds of K. Using black and white Group4 TIFF would reduce the image sizes drastically, but make the viewing app more complex, since no browser renders TIFF automatically. (Sigh.)
Since openlibrary is associated with archive.org, they should have plenty of outgoing bandwidth. Trouble is, incoming bandwidth costs the end-user money. I don't know, maybe the re-allocation of the old analog TV frequency bands will make it easier and cheaper for people to get decent bandwidth in the USA.
incoming bandwidth is always a killer, in my mind. Just as it seems like your computer downloads stuff fast enough, the internet fills up with things which are huge enough to make your bandwidth obsolete again.
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