Our Enduring Values Revisited Quotes

“(“the book”) is important not primarily because of its intrinsic value but because it has proven to be, at least up to now, the most effective means of both disseminating and preserving the textual content of the human record.”
― Michael E. Gorman, Our Enduring Values Revisited: Librarianship in an Ever-Changing World

“To illustrate: online, chat, and IM reference services may or may not represent an improvement in library service—the use of the human record—but do not affect its content or onward transmission. Also, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and videogames may enrich and enliven the lives of many (including many library workers and users), but they scarcely add to the store of knowledge through which understanding and wisdom are gained. This is not to say that libraries are wrong in using social media, encouraging videogaming, installing 3-D printers, or engaging with their communities in any way, technological or otherwise; just that they should not confuse these activities with the task of facilitating human interaction with the human record. Our central concerns are with content, not the means of communicating that content, and certainly not with modes of communication that are peripheral to the human record.”
― Michael E. Gorman, Our Enduring Values Revisited: Librarianship in an Ever-Changing World

“Let me try to clear the ground by reiterating three definitions proposed twenty years ago in a book cowritten with Walt Crawford,8 and adding a fourth to define the content of the various types of resource that constitute the human record as it is encountered and experienced in libraries: Data: Facts and other raw material that can be processed into useful information. Information: Data processed and rendered useful. Knowledge: Information transformed into meaning and made manifest in texts, cartographic, and other visual or audiovisual materials. Imaginative/aesthetic creations: Literary texts, graphic/visual/audiovisual creations, and the like, in which the aesthetic transcends the utilitarian.”
― Michael E. Gorman, Our Enduring Values Revisited: Librarianship in an Ever-Changing World

“Though many people now think that digital technology has created an entirely new way of learning, the fact is that there are only three ways in which human beings learn and that digital technology is but the latest manifestation of the third and most recent of those ways. Humans learn: • from experience (physical interaction with, and observation of, the world) and have done ever since the first humans learned that one red berry may be tasty and healthful and another might kill you; • from communicating with people who know more than they do (speech and hearing) and have done so since the first wise woman taught the first band of early humans huddled in the safety of a cave; and • from interaction with the human record (written, symbolic, and visual records) and have done so since the age of miracles began with the invention of writing many millennia ago. The third way of learning permits the first two ways to extend across space and time—the records of experience and knowledge allow those remote in time and distance to learn from the experience and knowledge of others.”
― Michael E. Gorman, Our Enduring Values Revisited: Librarianship in an Ever-Changing World