Good Books Independently Cataloged

This morning The Chronicle featured this news story, "Librarians Duel Over the Future of Producing Bibliographic Records", essentially a story about the protests librarians are making against the IT-ification of the profession--the move to take the "know" out of knowledge in favor of "Knol" and the like.

I've also become aware of the UI libraries' move to consolidate and make other changes in a move towards "Planning for New Service Models" (ugh, more money-sucking administrative committees).

I started searching for a recent Journal of the American Academy of Information Science article on algorithms and academic search, instead finding this article titled, "A user-centered functional metadata evaluation of moving image collections." Thinking it, like about half of the articles in JAAIS, was close to what I was looking for, I clicked on the link at the bottom of the page: Related Articles, * Find other articles like this in Wiley InterScience. The first two returns weren't bad. The third, "Corporate public affairs research: chronological reference list," fourth, " Confocal laser scanning microscopy of calcium dynamics in living cells," and fifth, "Biliary drainage in obstructive jaundice: Experimental and clinical aspects" just illustrate the reason for the librarians' ire and words of caution. As long as "AI" and "algorithms" are nearly interchangeable for search and other associative tasks, humans cannot be replaced by machines. (Helped, yes.)

These are also reasons why traditional libraries have collections of related items. While the algorithm can look across Wiley's "collection" and make connections that a human would not necessarily see, it also makes connections that are largely nonsensical and a waste of time to mere mortals who, while we won't be replaced by humans twice as fast in 18 months, do not have 18 months of our lives to waste wading through bungled corporate computer code.

So, just as I alluded to in "Good Books Independently Edited" librarians are important to the efficient transfer of information just as editors are. And perhaps small and/or academic presses, and libraries, occupy niches that big corporations cannot fill.