Week 5 Readings Reactions

Seanan McGuire

Across the Digital Divide

McGuire’s short entry explains the “digital divide” as the separation of those who can afford e-readers, e-books, and other technology, and those who can barely afford used books.

She makes a good point that because e-books will never be sold as “used” for lower prices, this makes them even more impossible for an impoverished person to obtain. McGuire mentions she is pessimistic, and I have to agree with her. I don’t think physical books are in any danger of being replaced by e-books any time remotely soon, in part because of the aforementioned used book market.

Molly Joss

Examining the Role of Libraries in an E-book World

Joss points out the overblown control publishers have over e-books that they do not have with print books.

I had vague knowledge before reading this article that HarperCollins had done something with e-books to annoy libraries, but I wasn’t aware of what. Finding out that they were limiting loans per e-book so severely got my attention.  Since e-books don’t wear out like print books do, and thus wouldn’t require libraries to purchase replacement titles every so often, I understand the business logic behind their policy. However, I think a better and fairer solution would be to license e-books for a certain period of time, based on how long print books last in circulation.

Glyn Moody

The Koha Saga: A gift that keeps giving

Moody explains the Koha case as an example of open source technology gone wrong. While this case appears to have been resolved, Moody cautions other open source projects to secure trademarks early to avoid such a situation.

I don’t know much about open source software, aside from the main idea that it is free for anyone to use. I took this article mainly as a lesson about how quickly businesses can change ownership, and something that was once free could easily be charged for if proper legal action isn’t taken to protect that freedom from the beginning.

Sharon Q. Yang and Melissa A. Hofmann

The Next Generation Library Catalog: A comparative Study of the OPACs of Koha, Evergreen, and Voyager

The authors detail what the ideal Library 2.0 catalog would include and then rate the integrated library systems Koha, Evergreen, and Voyager on how well each matches up.

The ideal catalog feature that stood out most to me was faceted navigation. This is something I almost always see in the public library catalogs that I use as well as in the Bookmaster software that I use at Barnes and Noble. This is such a useful feature for narrowing down sources for research; I’m surprised there are so many academic libraries using Voyager, which doesn’t have this capability.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone

RFID in Libraries

Caldwell-Stone discusses the use of RFIDs in libraries and how their use in retail and publishing can compromise the ethical obligations of librarians to provide privacy for their patrons.

As far as I understand them RFIDs identify a book using various bibliographic information allowing books to be checked in and out easily in a library. They can also be used in retail situations, although the article isn’t very clear on how, security and sales tracking seem to be likely. To address the needs of both the commercial book industry as well as libraries, perhaps the data fields on the RFID of a book should be able to be turned off once that book is owned by a library, using instead the recommended unique barcode.