Blog-Fearing ALA President Bitten by the Blogs

The Law Pundit has frequented libraries since his early days and has quite a private library of his own, so that he is certainly no enemy of good libraries.

However, we see that Google's digitization of millions of books for online access by "the masses" has the poor library people up in arms. Indeed, particularly the rise of the masses in blogs seems to be a cause for the librarians' wrath.

Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, and Dean of Library Services, Madden Library, California State University, Fresno, has an appropriately blog-fearing article in the Library Journal of February 25, 2005 entitled Revenge of the Blog People!.

Gorman has made the mistake of attacking bloggers (this is generally done only by those who really understand nothing about blogging), and also the present posting is his reaping of the fruits of the seeds he himself has sown.

Here is how Gorman describes blogs:

"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People."

What a stupid thing to write. It is rather hard to believe that the president-elect of the ALA could be this out of touch with reality.

Not having learned from experience, he writes the above article defiantly after bloggers had already criticized him previously for questioning the usefulness of Google book digitization, by which he called into question the usefulness of digital availability of such information to all citizens. Some people still do not understand "democracy" in its core value.

With uninformed people like this at the head of the main US library institution, the demise of libraries is not far off. Mark our words that the next decades will be marked by massive library closings since all the world will doing their research on the screen. Blog Bitten People such as Gorman will have accelerated this development.

The entire controversy reminds us of the Egyptology library at the University of Trier in Germany, our former abode as Lecturer in Law. That library is kept unter lock and key like the safe of a bank to make sure that unauthorized persons do not obtain access to books which might be used to upset the dusty applecarts of the virtually mothballed academic disciplines which deal with this region of the world.

Freedom of Information is simply not something relished by information monopolists.

Gorman wirtes:

"In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief."

Horror, no. Contempt, yes.