The Information Professional
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Librarians and Archivists in a fast-changing digital lanscape
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How to kill a library, By Kitty Pope

How to kill a library, By Kitty Pope | The Information Professional | Scoop.it

"[...]there are more than a few ways to kill a library.

For example:

√ Stop believing in the libraries mission. Do we really believe in the freedom to read, learn and discover?

√ Spend less time with the board. The ideal public library board would meet 4 times per year and agrees with everything the CEO recommended.

√ Stop talking to your customers. What do they know any way? And on the same topic, stop consulting staff. It is a huge time waster.

√ Don’t worry about the future and how you will get there. Sustainability is not an issue with which libraries need to be concerned. After all, we’ve have survived for hundreds of years.

√ Stop telling the library story. Everyone has heard our story.

√ Accept that the library building is old and you don’t need to keep renovating, painting, and updating it. It is what it is.

√ Accept that just like instant coffee killed the coffee bean, the e-book will kill the printed book.

√ Stop promoting the product; everyone knows about literacy and lifelong learning.

√ Stop empowering staff, and stop training them. They should come to us fully trained.

√ Stop all this talk about innovation. It just makes for more work.

√ And, for heaven’s sake, stop changing the rules and our traditions. It’s annoying!"

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A Not Too Technical Explanation of XML in the library

A Not Too Technical Explanation of XML in the library | The Information Professional | Scoop.it

At the heart of every librarian is the desire to organize information so that it is accessible; a library without a cataloging system is just a pile of books. ....

 

The challenge before librarians today is to take the seemingly unknowable expanse of electronic resources, and catalogue it so that it is available to users searching from many different portals, in different languages and in different platforms. In this present challenge, XML is the best option for organization and delivery of information. Once translated and catalogued under XML standards, the bibliographic information of any scanned text or object is comprehensive, with more depth and cataloguing detail than ever before. This in turn affects library applications such as inter library loans and the storing and accessing of digital libraries or archives.

 

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