I recently returned from ALA Annual. Like a lot of people I was fairly trepidatious about New Orleans, but the city did itself proud. Despite the wilting heat and iffy infrastructure, the conference seemed to go off pretty much without a hitch. The highlight of the trip was, of course, the delicious food, but I also went to programs!
The ALCTS Networked Resources & Metadata Interest Group (soon to become the Metadata Interest Group, yay) put on a couple of interesting sessions. A program on rights management weighed in at a hefty four hours, but covered a lot of interesting territory regarding rights and institutional repositories. Among the highlights, Scholars’ Bank is distinguishing itself as a singularly thoughtful IR venture in terms of both content and policy, and a medical society publisher had some interesting things to say about the issue of versioning. In his experience, most authors aren’t sure which version of a journal article they are permitted and/or obligated to post to fulfill their various responsibilities to granting agencies, research institutions, publishers, etc. and was concerned about uncorrected versions of articles getting into the hands of unsuspecting readers. Relating to long-term rights management, an interesting point came up at the NRMIG discussion group the next day: considering that one of the most important pieces of data to have about a document for rights management purposes is the death date of the author, name authority practice that emphasizes conflict resolution over completeness (dates aren’t recorded at all except to resolve a conflict, and death dates are optional) has compromised a potentially rich source of rights metadata. Sigh. Along with preservation, rights management is still uncharted territory for libraries.
I decided at the last minute to attend the ALCTS President’s program, which featured David Levy of the University of Washington talking about “mindful work” and the use of technology. Levy talked about the historical precedent for “productive leisure” and the fact that our ubiquitous technologies often intrude into our space for thoughtful introspection (he neglected to mention that, in the past, much of that productive leisure was made possible by a large underclass that worked more or less continuously from childhood until death – class warriors, do your worst). He was an engaging speaker, and it’s hard to disagree with his essential point that we need to find a balance between the technologies that compete for our attention and the inner space needed to think. However:
- I just don’t understand the concept of information overload. There has always been too much information to process – scientists complained about this phenomenon four centuries ago. It is the job of every person, and especially the job of every information professional, to meter their own information intake to a satisfactory level according to their own interests and priorities. I don’t see why there needs to be a “movement” to address this.
- This presentation dovetailed nicely with other arguments floating around the profession that we need to start providing more effective tools for our USERS so they can spend less time searching and more time learning. However, I got the sense that many people in the audience were looking to this program to validate their sense that technology is oppressive and harmful to OUR quality of life. Noooo!
