How Others See Us
June 14th, 2007 Brian Herzog
Yesterday, a few major libraryland blogs talked about Michael Gorman's outlook on the state of Web 2.0, as posted on Encyclopedia Britannica's blog. Since I agree with most of what they said, I won't post my own comments here. But what I do want to say is this:
I wasn't really surprised to see this much activity by library-related bloggers. This is what we do for a living, so when the former President of the American Library Association makes some narrow-minded comments that are counter to the direction of the field, it make sense that we'd whip up our own little tempest.
However, when someone outside our teapot, in a forum as large as Boing Boing, also takes note of him, I start to feel ashamed. To offend a bunch of librarians is one thing; to make librarianship look bad (by poo-pooing the very tools we and our patrons are using to organize and access information) to the rest of the world is entirely different.
