My Confession

To begin my blog, and subsequently my reflections on topics in electronic resources management, I thought I would do a self-inventory of sorts and assess what the assumptions, biases, and experiences I bring to the table are when conceptualizing and using electronic resources. 

Personally, I have always been one of those people who is nostalgic for those mythical “simpler times” in the past. I miss pre-Internet days when email didn’t have to be checked on an hourly basis; when facebook didn’t suck up a considerable portion of your day; and when all phone calls were made on landlines (no texting!) That being said, it’s not hard to believe that I’ve had a certain resistance to seeing libraries embracing the digital at the expense of paper and other tangible formats. I have a “healthy fear” of the Internet (I still pay bills with a check in the mail) and therefore all systems and services available through it. I am much like the proverbial musty professor with tweed jacket and leather elbow patches who would still prefer to go to the library stacks to find a journal article in its printed form than read it in a PDF. (I have to say, computers really take a toll on my eyes!) 

Professionally, my personal biases against the digital and electronic have only been enforced, seeing as my job puts me at odds with all that is electronic. I work in the Preservation Department of my library (a library department that is going the way of the buffalo) where we are concerned with saving materials on paper, and even (gasp!) bothering to microfilm them. We give a collective shudder when we have to utter the words “Google Book Project,” not only because of how our books are returned to us mutilated after they are scanned, but also because Google Books (and other digitization projects) have too easily been accepted by patrons and administrators as effective and acceptable alternatives to true preservation and conservation techniques. (This is of course based on the presumption that you actually think things really do need to be preserved for indefinite periods of time.) I therefore tend to bear a bit of ill-will to electronic resources which tend to masquerade as a somehow “perfect” and non-degradable facsimile of original materials, although I realize this has nothing to do with the actual utility that it affords. (Late-night keyword searching: been there, done that!) 

These prejudices I bear against the digital and the electronic are clearly something I need to challenge given the direction that librarianship has taken and is taking. Even if I prefer to read something on paper, library patrons may not (or perhaps cannot). While I do appreciate the benefits of electronic resources -- I’m not a total Luddite, just fyi -- perhaps my nostalgia for the “simpler” times has clouded my judgment and not allowed me to fully embrace what new technologies and services through digital and electronic means can offer me and those I serve in the library. I hope that both by taking this course, and also publicly acknowledging (albeit begrudgingly) that I can no longer ignore electronic resources, I can, as my blog title says, “learn to stop worrying and love electronic resources.”