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> Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world's po
by throwawayjava 9y ago
> Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world's population, available on-demand, for "coffee money" not "university money."
Oh, I didn't realize tech invented the library card.
- msla 9y agoLibraries are not run with "Access to Information" as their main goal. They're run with service to patrons as their main goal. If you think I'm making a distinction without a difference, how many libraries have subscriptions to Playboy?
- throwawayjava 9y ago> how many libraries have subscriptions to Playboy? It might be a difference, but it's a difference for which the university comparison is a red herring. How many universities have a porn department?
- msla 9y agoUniversities can study porn under the heading of the humanities or social science. The fact they don't have an explicit "Department of Pornography" is both an accident of our culture and a reflection of the fact our "top-level categories" for academics are more abstract than that. My point is, libraries maintain a very curated collection, and choose their holdings and resources based on very restrictive criteria, including funding and shelf space, making them relatively poor at keeping broad and deep holdings. Until you give the library an Internet connection, which brings us back to the origin of this sub-thread.
- throwawayjava 9y agoI think we're both way off topic if jerf's description of the intended meaning of the quote is accurate. But I have yet to be in a university library that stocks back-issues of Playboy...
- justin_oaks 9y agoIt would be interesting to determine how many people in the world have access to a library, how many people have internet access, and how much overlap there is between the two groups.
- jerf 9y agoAs cool as libraries are, and they are cool, if you value your time at even minimum wage rates, they are not "coffee money". That's why you... yes, you, even you... whip out your phone to answer questions that you would never dream of running to the library to answer on the spot. This is a real effect, not an illusion. Friction matters, a lot.
- throwawayjava 9y agoAgain, all these things people are saying are indeed true, but they also make the university comparison in the original quote something of a red herring.
- jerf 9y agoI'm not sure you, or any other of the other commenters in this thread, quite understand what was meant by "university money". "University money" is what it costs to buy scientific journals; in theory anybody can do it, in practice only Universities have both the need and the funding to do it. It isn't that your phone is a university... it is that it has all this information accessible for so dirt cheap that African farmers can get at it, modulo the language barrier.
- throwawayjava 9y agoInteresting, thanks for the clarification.