3 ms·
Digital has hardly replaced analogue as the superior form of anything. Providing services digitally is more convenient but the experience is still often second
by fsloth 8y ago
Digital has hardly replaced analogue as the superior form of anything. Providing services digitally is more convenient but the experience is still often second rate.
Inefficient? Hardly. A book in paper form is considered by many people to be superior form of digesting complex information.
Secondly, a library contains
a) librarians that help you find what you need
b) huge curated collections of books, carefully categorized
c) the categories themselves! One might learn something new by just investigating what categories of knowledge there are.
Libraries are the analogue manifestation of the entire body of knowledge humankind has collected over millenia. In the past there were these silly VR interfaces in movies where the person could dive into information and find what they were looking for by diving in a sea of information. Well, that place exists in the every manifestation of a proper library adminstered by trained informaticians, and the physical shape of the thing is designed to help one find and digest knowledge.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago> a library contains a) librarians that help you find what you need I wonder how long this will last in Finland, actually. Banking in Finland, for example, has slashed employees drastically and tried to get customers to do as much as possible online instead of visiting a branch and talking to a human being who has to be paid an expensive salary. So far, at libraries in Helsinki you can easily talk to a librarian who is willing to help you find whatever obscure publications or media you are looking for. But some bureaucrat or political faction obsessed with cost-cutting and automation could see this as a bad thing and believe that library patrons should instead to expected to figure out how to just use Helmet/Helka/Arsca (Helsinki’s library catalogues) on their own, except perhaps for a very limited time slot each day.
- fsloth 8y agoAs long as books remain physical, labour will be required to handle them. Some parts of the library logistics can be automated, but not all. No robot is going to replace a human librarian any time soon.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoI was speaking about the possibility of slashing librarian numbers only in their role as customer-facing reference staff who help people look up information. Of course there will remain a place for some human librarians behind the scenes. That said, Helsinki libraries have already automated a great deal. You can easily borrow items or reserve spaces without ever having to talk to a human being.