Marylaine Block, a library consultant, trainer and writer, runs the highly readable Ex Libris site, an e-zine that I’ll call a blog even though it’s actually much more. I have no idea where she stands on TeleRead, but I’d certainly agree with her sentiments on information needs. Here’s part of The Fate of Non-Digitized Scholarly Resources.
“Have you been paying attention to how your journal collections are being used these days? How many loose issues are you reshelving? How many bound volumes are sitting next to the copy machine at the end of the day? How many reels of microfilm are you having to re-file each day? How many people are asking for back issues that you store elsewhere? Are these numbers going down?
“They were at my library in the last couple of years I worked there–and I worked at a university library, where students are expected to make use of scholarly literature. To give them credit, they did, at least as long as we could steer them to scholarly articles available full-text on our databases, where all they had to do was push a button to print the articles. But if all the students found were citations, they weren’t interested, not even if the journals were on shelves six feet away from where the students were sitting…
“We can insist that students must be taught good research method, and taught about the structure of information. We can tell students that research was being done on their topic before 1980, and insist that students find it, the old way, slogging through ancient physical volumes of Psychological Abstracts and International Index to Periodicals and the like.
“I don’t think it will work, though.
“It’s like insisting that students do their shopping at small shops, with limited stock, open from 10-5, Monday through Saturday, when they know perfectly well that Wal-Mart and internet stores have lots more selection and are open all the time…”
