[Publib] Re: Hostage Data - Was Jobs and People

[Robert Balliot]

Great thread!  Librarians have given up basic control of their catalogs to
vendors. Librarians are no longer in charge of quality of their user
interfaces.
Many do not even control their own websites - they have contracted out to
non-librarian designers.

So, the two main current marketing interfaces cannot even be modified
by the people responsible - without permission from a commercial entity.
Without flexibility, it is very hard to react to changes in the marketplace.

Of course, big commercial vendors are able to take out massive advertising
in all of the trade publications - selling and reselling their services as
the 'best'
option to learning 'how to fish'.  And, perhaps they are.  Yet, it also
creates
an intellectual environment where that path of least resistance is to know
less that you should to manage your own resources.

Perhaps five years ago, there was an excuse for librarians not to know how
to manage hypertext or create their own databases. Now it seems that many
have become like the Eloi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eloi> of H.G. Wells
*The Time Machine. *While they
enjoyed their banal existence and gave up control, they are consumed.


R. Balliot
http://oceanstatelibrarian.com



On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Jesse Ephraim <jephraim at roanoketexas.com>wrote:

He did the same with other city departments.  Since I had a strong
background in IT and IT training, I became the software trainer for the
entire city (in addition to being a librarian).  We had the circulation
clerks work on labor-intensive emergency jobs for other city
departments, doing everything from stuffing envelopes to data entry and
more.  We marketed ourselves as the research branch of the city
departments, and helped a lot of them with various projects.  They
started to see us as a valuable INTERNAL resource, in addition to our
traditional functions.

>
> >To do much of this, we need to unlock our data from the control of ILS
> vendors.
>
> Absolutely.  The library world has locked itself into an expensive,
> unnecessary arrangement ILS vendors, and (in many cases) allowed them to
> take our data hostage.  That's a whole thread in its own right.
>
>
> Jesse Ephraim
>
> Director, Roanoke Public Library
> 308 S. Walnut
> Roanoke, Texas 76262
> (817) 491-2691
> jephraim at roanoketexas.com
>
>
>
>
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