Today there was an NPR report on privatizing the publication of government documents. The concern was that government reports would become less accessible, but there's practically nothing about electronic versions. It's true that some of the government sites I've visited don't make it easy to find the documents they have available, so maybe even if we don't need someone to catalog them, we need someone with more websmarts to make everything easily accessible to people who aren't experts in the field.

This reminds me of a meeting we had a couple of weeks ago about how the university library was going to cut some of its dead tree subscriptions in favor of electronic ones. The point of the presentation as I saw it was that the electronic ones come in packages, so if/when there are more cutbacks, it'll be really hard to decide what to cut next. But the faculty seemed mostly exercised about not being able to hold paper texts in their hands. There was also complaining about the fact that the journals weren't getting any cheaper, even though the publishers' costs were plummeting. I pointed out that faculty could get together and publish their own electronic journals, which after all cost virtually nothing. But I was told that such journals probably wouldn't be acceptable to administrators reviewing people's publications. I still don't get it. If academic journals are edited by academics, all the editors of a particular journal have to do is to move en masse to establish an entirely new journal that preserves everything but the name of the dead tree version. In fact, the electronic journals could post the experts' corrections & additions to the original, for which they'd be credited. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks like the real problem is conservatism.

Meanwhile, we're about to start building an addition to the library even though years from now, I suspect most everything in it will be digitized. Not the customers, though. Apparently there's going to be a coffee shop. I guess we're competing with Barnes and Nobble.