Our SLS Reference Service subscribers to ALA Edition's approval program, so we recently received a copy of Magic & Hypersystems by Harold Billings. They let me look at it to get my opinion about keeping it for our professional collection, so I did one of my many sophisticated, complex tests - I turned to a random page and looked for something that interested me. Here's what I found:

"Despite the noise from many quarters these days, there has long been a national information infrastructure. It is called libraries. But the failure of the library profession to assert the very special and important role that its members have played in creating and maintaining this long-extant infrastructure...has helped leave them without the full stature they should command." [p.75]

There wasn't anything especially new in the excerpt I read, although I wish I had time to read the whole thing. But the phrase "national information infrastructure" made me stop for a moment. It's a message I think we need to hit home with legislators and taxpayers, especially in light of budget cuts and attempts to remove information from the public domain.

There's also a chapter called "The Bionic Library" that includes this passage:

"Electronic information is a garden ready to flower, particularly if it will move towards a new distribution, use, and payment paradigm. To some scholars, the concept of an electronic library is paradise at hand; to others it is absolutely terrifying. I suggest that libraries are evolving as bionic libraries: organic, evolutionary, and electronically enhanced." [p.37]

I like the garden analogy, especially in light of our (librarians') practice of "weeding" material in our collections. Or on the internet, which is one of the things I think the whole email spam controversy is about - the need to weed (preferably before the user sees it).

I'm not suggesting that librarians become spam filters (or electronically enhanced!), but I do hope we're stepping up to the plate to help with new paradigms and garden paths. The conferences I have been attending recently suggest to me that we are, although we're not yet at a point where users are realizing the benefits. Soon, grasshopper, soon.

Oh, and the whole garden thing is also a great analogy for the entertainment industry, don't you think? Will they let it bloom or die?