Fly and hope, or, What about interlibrary loan?

Matthew Beacom comments on Sergey Brin's recent NY Times editorial concerning the Google Books deal:

"Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks."

What the hell is he talking about? There is no need to fly and hope. He must know that you have at least one other choice: use your computer to 1. look up the book in WorldCat to see what libraries have copies 2. email your local library to use its inter-library loan service to get the book for you. He can't be ignorant of this--Google has a deal with OCLC that joins Google Book Search and WorldCat--so why did he say "fly" and "hope"? One effect of this: it makes me wonder if the other things he says are just as fishy as this. I don't know anything about those other things, but seeing what he said about the one piece I do know about makes me doubt everything else he says.

Comments

[Shawne Miksa]

You tell 'em, sister!

Mr. Brin is clearly still operating within the typical college student perception that it's really cool to make to graduation without ever having used the library.

[David Bade]

Christine: Your comment "seeing what he said about the one piece I do know about makes me doubt everything else he says" is a perfect summary of what I have been saying for many years about shared cataloging. It is one aspect of "authority" that has been largely left out of our discussion of authority control and our practices involving copy cataloging.

[Christine Schwartz]

Hi Shawne,

As one of my colleague said, "getting books to people is what libraries are all about." It would be nice for Google to get to know libraries a little better before they "replace" us.

[Christine Schwartz]

Hi David,

While I can't take credit for Matthew Beacom's words, I agree with his sentiment.

Claiming our "authority" when it comes to cataloging/authority control seems to be difficult for some catalogers.

We are way too caught up in the technology tsunami. I say this as someone who's found that I really enjoy working with non-MARC metadata and computer programming. And I do believe that much of what we do in the future will involve the Web. But I also recognize that we're losing something valuable with libraries' rush to embrace technology no-holds-barred. People need to read Clifford Stoll, Neil Postman, and Thomas Mann (the librarian) IMHO.