I don’t know how this will come across, but I have serious reservations about the suggestion I’ve seen in a few places that libraries can take advantage of Wikipedia being down to promote the library.<\/p>\n
I mean, yes, we can<\/em> do that, but if libraries are only useful when Wikipedia’s down then libraries are pretty crappy. And yes, I know that’s not what people are meaning when they’re suggesting\/doing this, but it’s what it comes across like to me at least. I envisage hordes of students desperately trying to finish their assignments grudgingly admitting, “Okay, for that one 24-hour period in a lifetime when Wikipedia’s down, the library’s kinda useful. Apart from being slow and clunky and not giving me enough or up-to-date enough information. Thank $Deity Wikipedia’s back up tomorrow!”<\/p>\n Because to be honest, when it comes to ready reference, everything sucks compared to Wikipedia. I’m a librarian, I know my library’s resources, and I’m also a geek and know how to search the web at large, but if I want a quick introduction to almost anything I go to Wikipedia. If I want to figure out what model my cellphone is, if I want a description of a database that isn’t a salespitch, if I want a listing of all the episodes of White Collar, if I want a summary of King Lear, if I want to decode a biochemical reference query I’ve just received by email so I can start answering it…<\/p>\n If I want to know something and I want to know it now, not in two minutes time, I go to Wikipedia. Because none of the library’s references resources is anywhere near as convenient, easy to use, up-to-date, or thorough.<\/p>\n (If I need to know for certain<\/em> I’ll double-check elsewhere. But that doesn’t happen nearly as regularly as needing to know it now<\/em>.)<\/p>\n So to me, the blackout as an opportunity to promote the library as a replacement for Wikipedia is just an opportunity to show people one of our greatest weaknesses. The strengths of a library are so much more than that, but we can’t promote them by setting up this comparison.<\/p>\n The real opportunity of the SOPA blackout is to educate people about intellectual property and freedom of information. You know — that thing which the blackout was supposed to be about.<\/p>\n Beyond the simple ethics of not hijacking an important cause (and btw, I have even graver misgivings about using the blackout to promote the databases sold to us by the publishers supporting SOPA!), teaching people about this stuff is a much more important part of our mission than pointing them to the encyclopaedias. And fulfilling this mission will do far more to promote our real strengths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t know how this will come across, but I have serious reservations about the suggestion I’ve seen in a few places that libraries can take advantage of Wikipedia being down to promote the library. I mean, yes, we can do that, but if libraries are only useful when Wikipedia’s down then libraries are pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[88,48,87],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}