The news establishment has not always cottoned well to blogging. Turf-intrusion alarms go off. As Glenn Harlan Reynolds has noted, bloggers in effect serve as freelance editors–hyper-eager not only to comment on the news, but also on the reporting of it. The better journalists fear not. In fact, they may jump in and start their own blogs, recognizing that blogging actually can be A Good Thing in the hands of pros and nonpros alike. Too bad that large pockets of resistance remain.

Likewise a circle-the-wagons ‘tude can come up when nonlibrarians venture into librarian territory. Project Gutenberg at times has encountered hostility from some librarians worried about competition. And in a related disappointment, an Internet archivist without a library science degree watched some of his best efforts vanish from the Net because the supposedly preserved material had not been registered with the U.S. Copyright office. I myself find that in evaluating TeleRead, librarians will sometimes take the lazy approach and say, “Well, get your library science degree first.” Certain librarians also fear TeleRead as a job-threat (when actually it would expand opportunities in their profession since there would be more information to be organized and new opportunities for librarians to serve as guides and mentors for schoolchildren and others). Simply put, we’re talking about the public interest vs. “professionalism.” One recalls some old wisdom from George Shaw–his Bierce-like description of professions as “a conspiracy against the laity.” Along those lines, a logical question comes up: How could an actual TeleRead benefit from the labor and enthusiasm of the “nonprofessionals” and at the same time protect the quality of the collection?

The answer is to nurture both approaches. For example, TeleRead could offer easy filtering mechanisms, for those who wanted to use them, to limit searches to material that had been processed and evaluated by librarians and academics. At the same time, it could store and to an extent even finance the efforts of Gutenberg and similar projects. In fact, PG-type material could eventually be migrated over to the formal collections once its quality had been assessed by librarians. While public domain texts from volunteers often suffer the limits of ASCII, there is very much a place for them in formal collections as long as reproduction is accurate and complete enough for lay readers and as long as the material’s origins are clear.

Point is, librarians should keep in mind the real reason books pass out of the collective memory. It is not for lack of faithful reproduction. Instead it is because people stop reading them. Fighting this threat is what Gutenberg-style projects are all about. Furthermore, even the best publishers and librarians cannot know what works truly deserve to live on; consider the neglect that books such as Moby Dick faced for years before gaining recognition as classics. Simply put, the preservation of books and other content is too important a task to be left just to librarians and publishers.

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Update: Bookshare, a nonprofit that has put thousands of e-books online for the disabled, is a great example of a group that understands the needs of ordinary readers and does not confuse them with those of acadaemics. Bookshare, for example, may write about an e-book: “Quality: Good, some errors.”

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