I’m seeing tremendous blogbuzz about “We the Media,” Dan Gillmor’s new book about the impact of blogging on journalism and news reporting. But I haven’t seen any citations for this book (even a notation of “purchased”) in any of a half-dozen major library catalogs I checked.
Dan is a great thinker and writer, and he won the Pioneer Award a couple years ago for his efforts on behalf of civil liberties. Besides, even if Dan couldn’t reason his way out of a revolving door, people are talking about this book. Put it on library shelves! Now! Where is Marvin Scilken when we need him? (Oh, right: he’s where he should be, scolding us to run to the local bookstore and put this book on the shelves, today.)
Dan Gillmor put his book on the Web (with an accompanying blog worth tracking), and do use that to look it over. The Table of Contents alone is a treat, and poking through the book’s content makes it clear this is good reading. However, by the time I print out the PDFs, I would have spent more in toner than the book actually costs. Cites & Insights is worthy of that effort (and short enough to be a worthy tradeoff for the cost), but a full-length book isn’t.
I suppose I could do a Rube Goldberg device: download the PDFs and import them into my Treo, which would in turn convert the chapters to a quasi-text format–but then again, reading a book on a screen the size of a playing card sounds like unnecessary punishment. And don’t I deserve a shiny new hardcover? A present for finishing my first semester? Sure I do…
Meanwhile, as I talk myself into this purchase while feeling sad about the state of collection development, I’m also recoiling in pain and horror at how bad basic search is in most major library catalogs. Too often it feels like a bad afterthought. I was spooked by how poorly most catalogs handled a keyword search for Gillmor’s book. And don’t treat it like an exception: I’m regularly spooked with all searches I do–and I do a lot of catalog searches.
If only enough of us with the power to change things really cared about helping users find things, and not about stoking the engines of locomotives running along abandoned tracks.
Posted on this day, other years:
- The alarming five-year pin - 2014
- The Reluctant Cataloger - 2012
- Theme changed, feeds appear fixed, WordPress upgraded - 2008
- Bobbing to the surface - 2007
- Trip Itinerary - 2006
- Moveon.org Vigil for Cindy Sheehan at Middlefield and Colorado, Palo Alto - 2005
I checked WorldCat, and there are only four libraries that own this book at this time, and all four are public libraries. My guess is that there may be other libraries that will purchase this title soon, but the timing of the release (this month) combined with the new fiscal and academic years may have created an ordering backlog that is slowing the process. I am going to suggest it to our Communications Department liaison.
We the media
OREILLY — Dan Gillmor’s We the Media launched last week in Silicon Valley and I think our multimedia skunk works project team needs to read one of the chapters as an MP3. I’ll track back to Niall Kennedy’s initiative and
I put in a request today, so I hope LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library in Tallahassee will be added to your list soon.
I agree with what you say about the difficulty of keyword searching – as a cataloger I sometimes add words in strategic fields that I hope will help searchers. I also try to see that similar books (only the ones I happen to remember, of course) have at least one subject heading in common, so that a person who finds one of them in the catalog can find the other by clicking on the subject heading. Rather like bailing out a boat with a teaspoon, but I keep trying.