BiblioTech Quotes

“An innovative librarian from Finland, Kari Lämsä, said it well in an interview: “Libraries are not so serious places. We should not be too afraid of mistakes. We are not hospitals. We cannot kill people here. We can make mistakes and nobody will die. We can try and test and try and test all the time.” A spirit of risk-taking and assessment, so common among technology developers, has an important place in the world of libraries today.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“THERE ARE EXTRAORDINARY librarians in every age. Many of today’s librarians, such as Jessamyn West, Sarah Houghton, and Melissa Techman, have already made the transition and become visionary, digital-era professionals. These librarians are the ones celebrated in Marilyn Johnson’s This Book Is Overdue! and the ones who have already created open-source communities such as Code4Lib, social reading communities such as LibraryThing and GoodReads, and clever online campaigns such as “Geek the Library.” There are examples in every big library system and in every great library and information school. These leaders are already charting the way toward a new, vibrant era for the library profession in an age of networks. They should be supported, cheered on, and promoted as they innovate. Their colleagues, too, need to join them in this transformation.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Libraries are more than community centers, just as librarians do more than answer questions you could easily ask Google. From the opening of the BPL, the first public library, to the expansion of public libraries across America through the Carnegie libraries, the library as an institution has been fundamental to the success of our democracy. Libraries provide access to the skills and knowledge necessary to fulfill our role as active citizens. Libraries also function as essential equalizing institutions in our society. For as long as a library exists in most communities, staffed with trained librarians, it remains true that individuals' access to our shared culture is not dictated by however much money they have.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Many of the people libraries serve today are ill equipped to take advantage of all the great things about the digital present and future. Since libraries must be guided by those they serve, they will be awkwardly straddling the analog and the digital for some period of time.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The independence of libraries matters because it means that our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“There’s no question that libraries are wonderful, but nostalgia is too thin a reed for librarians to cling to in a time of such transition. Nostalgia can actually be dangerous. For one thing, thinking of libraries as they were ages ago and wanting them to remain the same is the last thing we should want for them. For another, our nostalgic view doesn’t give libraries enough credit. Libraries offer a whole slew of services that we ignore when we just focus on pleasant reading rooms.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The most successful students are those who know that they can do better than grasp at the closest source of information. Reference librarians, who spend their days learning what is available in a broad range of fields and how to search for it, provide a great service for students and other library patrons.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“90 percent of the data in the world were created in the last two years.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Librarians have proven over and over that the profession is capable of extraordinary collaboration. More than forty years ago, a group of major libraries in Ohio recognized the importance of shared computing resources and established a partnership called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is now referred to primarily by its acronym. OCLC calls itself “the world’s largest library collaborative.” The library data and services provided by OCLC to 70,000 libraries around the world enables libraries to avoid a great deal of redundant work.9 The OCLC partnership has reduced the need for every library to create its own catalog record for every book or item it collects, creating enormous efficiencies. OCLC’s WorldCat system, for instance, allows anyone with web access to search across the catalogs of a large number of libraries to locate books wherever they are in the country. WorldCat is simple, but it has proved that implementing even the simplest of systems can be remarkably useful to library patrons.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Librarians have proven over and over that the profession is capable of extraordinary collaboration. More than forty years ago, a group of major libraries in Ohio recognized the importance of shared computing resources and established a partnership called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is now referred to primarily by its acronym. OCLC calls itself “the world’s largest library collaborative.” The library data and services provided by OCLC to 70,000 libraries around the world enables libraries to avoid a great deal of redundant work.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The internet was built over time, through massive coordination across public and private lines. Much of the early funding came from the government, especially the Department of Defense.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The risk of a small number of technically savvy, for-profit companies determining the bulk of what we read and how we read it is enormous.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The Obama administration, strong on support for education as a general rule and long on rhetoric about the importance of libraries, has failed when it comes to championing school libraries.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The vast majority of the libraries in the United States today—nearly 100,000 of them—are school libraries.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is the highest sense a teacher. —Melvil Dewey, 1876”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Today they may not even be able to experiment with such technologies if their in-house computer systems are restricted by their IT departments.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“In many library systems, there are too few hours in the day to do the research necessary to find the means of training and retraining, much less to accomplish this training.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Pinterest board for Library Journal called “Cheap and Cheerful Librarian Tips,” which links her interest in DIY arts-and-crafts projects with her library work.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Libraries can offer important alternatives to the services provided by the corporate sector, which will always have incentives to offer biased, limited, and costly access to knowledge.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“We still face a slew of digital divides, in that some people simply have better access to good computing equipment, fast network access, and digital literacy skills than others. These divides commonly fall along socioeconomic lines:”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The second paradox, and the subtler of the two, is that while information is ubiquitous in wealthy societies, it is often too hard to find, to make sense of, and to use.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“We will need smart people who can figure out how to save what we need to save and let the rest fade away.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“At Library 10, 80 percent of the events held are organized by patrons, not the staff.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“If libraries don’t meet the information needs of communities, then others will. Others are more likely to mix a profit motive in with activities that are broadly in the public interest, whether it’s Amazon’s interest in selling books, Google’s interest in selling ads based on searches, or the interest at Starbucks and McDonald’s in selling elaborate coffees and fast food.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“To promote further innovation in our libraries, however, we—the members of the public who rely on them—need to ensure that libraries and library hackers have the money, resources, and time they need to make this transition.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Library users tell survey researchers that they want access to more ebooks and they want libraries to offer more technologically up-to-date services.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“A clear trend in the growth of ebook circulation over a four-year period can be seen in the figures supplied by the service provider OverDrive: 4 million ebook checkouts in 2010 grew to 16 million in 2011, 54 million in 2012, and 79 million in 2013.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“The historical principles of librarianship—universal access to information, individual privacy, freedom of expression, and truth above all else—are as necessary now as they have ever been and must persist. At the same time, the balance of library leadership needs to swing more forcefully toward the new or libraries will fade in their significance to the American public.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

“Although the Library of Congress contains a wonderful law library and major universities have rich law school collections, there is no comprehensive map that shows where legal materials are preserved for the long run. One problem is deciding who exactly is going to do the preservation—and determining whether that party is doing it properly. Another big problem that collaborators need to address is how to locate and provide access to materials in archives, large and small, across the country. Once located, librarians can focus on providing the context and service that they are so good at.”
― John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google