BiblioTech - John Palfrey

The author talks about the future of libraries and the problems they're facing with having a future. I think he relies to much on a digital future, which inherently costs more as book publishers charge per borrow instead of a library just being able to purchase a book and lend it many times with a single cost.

If you're a reader and believe that libraries should be staying around, this is a good book to read.

Purchase BiblioTECH: Independent Publisher | Amazon | Book Depository

## Key Ideas

- plain old search online falls victim to easy publishing for everyone. On one hand this is good, but the quality is never verified.
- librarians can help you vet good from bad sources, and by the things they choose in the library they perform this function [^Page 142]

## Related

- see The Death of Expertise - Tom Nichols for similar ideas about very little being vetted for quality online, but people still take anything published online as the truth because it's online

#tagnote
- # digital is harder to preserve 202006170930

- digital stuff is harder to preserve than print [^Page 152]
1. Because so much is generated we can't ever keep track of it all
2. Due to bit rot and the need to continually change media over even if it's to the same format again
3. Format changes also render old stuff unreadable to future generations because the software to read it is no longer around
- books simply don't present this problem and thus on many levels take much less maintenance than digital records


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BiblioTECH - John Palfrey

- that means you purchase it and then you can do whatever you want with it [^Page 186]
- digital you end up leasing under restrictive covenants and continuing to pay for access which makes it expensive for libraries to hold onto digital content

## Related

- [Publishers Restricting Library Access to Ebooks](https://curtismchale.ca/2019/12/08/publishers-restricting-library-access-to-ebooks)


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BiblioTECH - John Palfrey

> The library browsing experience is strongly associated with the concept of serendipity. There is something powerful aboutthe idea that patrons will find on the shelves books they didn't expect to find. [^Page 207, 208]

- this same serendipity is found in a book store
- Amazon is goverened by the algorithym that takes out serendipity plus you can purchase space in "also bought"