Thoughts on Last Week's Class (3/14)

Since they are no readings for this week, I will focus on last week's class. Definitely the focal point of the class was the interactive talk about the #hcod debate with "Librarian By Day" Bobbi Newman. I'm trying to remember what else we did that night...planned our upcoming workshop (hope you guys are ready to get down and dirty with e-books!), discussed ethics, and kind of "debriefed" our book clubs somewhat. Thank goodness for Kristin's emails about what we do or I wouldn't be able to remember all of the things we accomplish in 3 hours!

Ok so the talk with Bobbi Newman. First, it was a great way to see Elluminate in action and see how we will navigate it ourselves when the time comes. Second, I didn't take notes on Bobbi's opinions and statements as the webinar proceeded. Perhaps that would have helped me write this post, but my intent was to let Bobbi's discussion sort of wash over me and help me build a better picture of this debate raging in libraryland. I absorbed much of what she said but the thing that struck me most was Bobbi's clear intent to remain as neutral as possible on the issue. Not just neutral in whether or not HarperCollins is the most evil publisher ever (which they are not) and we should boycott them or whatever, but rather quiet on how to proceed. As far as I can tell, Bobbi feels libraries needs to collaborate with publishers, but I'm still fuzzy on how they would actually do this. Ask to meet with HC? And who would meet? Reps from each consortia? ALA reps? But not everyone belongs to ALA or "believes" in their tenets, as Kristin reminded us in class. By the way, that totally shocked me. Naively, I believed every librarian had to belong to ALA to "matter" as a librarian. What an eye-opener!
Lastly, I attended "A Day in the Life of a Visiting Librarian" yesterday and Eli Neiburger was one of the visiting librarians from Ann Arbor District Library. Eli is the polar opposite of Bobbi, in my opinion, he makes very inflammatory opinionated statements with no hesitation! Despite my use of these inherently negative terms, I really like his attitude and I respect him greatly for taking a stand. One of the things he said, was that in a few years we will be begging for the "26 checkout" policy to make a return. In other words, it's going to get far worse for libraries, in terms of e-books (well and other things, too). His big push is for libraries to get a seat at the discussion table and not proceed though an intermediary, like Overdrive. If you want to hear his entertaining talk on why "Libraries are Screwed" here are the links to the Youtube videos. Keep in mind he If you're in SI 620 right now, you already watched them so ignore this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqAwj5ssU2c  (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd0lIKVstJg     (Part 2)

I just feel that I believe Bobbi's talk was the perfect entree for our class, to get a broad overview of the issue, I wanted to know, to have a little dessert at the end, what her total and unequivocal opinion was on this issue. I am worried that librarians have a tendency to be too nice and these days to get the best and most for our users we might have to get firm with big businesses out there and let them know we won't be steamrollered into submission.I still feel as a librarian who has yet to work out in the field, I don't have a fully developed idea of what the solution to the e-book problem is. Yet, I believe if enough librarians like Eli and Bobbi get fired up, they can save the day.