This week Newsweek is has a piece on community colleges that they are running in light of the $12 billion investment in federal money the President pledged towards them back in July.  Much like libraries, community colleges are a very valuable educational resource for the communities they serve.  The American community college has so much potential to serve as an engine for opportunity in its mission that the typical attitude and level of support directed towards community colleges is such a travesty considering their potential.

Well executed, the mission of the community college to offer a variety of vocational training and academic coursework puts it in a position to serve as an engine of economic opportunity in a very democratic manner.  The potential for the community college to play a larger role in society that complements and addresses the shortcomings of other venues of post secondary education seems to me to be a live option that ought to be explored as our country navigates its current economic situation.  I though can only wonder and speculate as to how things will play out.

Structured systems aren’t very different even when they occur in very different situations.  A recent story on Slashdot about approaching healthcare bill HR 3200 from a system design perspective like you’d find in computer science or information technology.  It is something that probably ought to be approached more often, this similarity between legislation and software.  A piece of legislation is much like a piece of software in that each type of system is a collection of instruction to be carried out in order to manage something.  A piece of software can compel your computer to function as a word processor, audio player, or communications device by compelling it to follow the instructions contained within the software.

Likewise we have laws that govern traffic, financial transactions, and other aspects of civilized society.  Different laws create various public institutions and manage the functioning of those institutions along with various policies institutions may enact to fill in details for things not explicitly covered under the law.

The big difference between legislation and software comes in the nature of what they govern.  While software governs a machine designed to explicitly execute instructions given to it, laws govern the behavior of people who are all decision makers in their own right.  Even if a law were to achieve a theoretically perfect level of completeness and consistency (and what that would mean is a subject of a complex debate on its own) because persons make decisions independently even a perfect law may not be perfectly followed, while a theoretically perfect piece of software running on a theoretically perfect computer could achieve perfect operation.

The original article analyzing this draft legislation is structured as a three part series of which the first and second parts are now available.

[Bruce F. Webster] via [Slashdot]

The contemporary library is in the middle of a transformation. With efforts to embrace new forms of media pushing to redefine the role of the library in the community, it is still too soon to declare the traditional library dead as CNN did. The library has always been a place for the maintenance of information resources and media for the community it serves. The migration of much information to digital resources has forced libraries to provide ways to accommodate these resources. Often these changes are very visually evident as libraries adapt their layouts to physically accommodate the growing importance of digital resources.

There are examples of some libraries moving entirely away from books. It will still be a long time until it will be reasonable though for all or even most libraries to abandon books. The digitized book is just now starting to be taken seriously as a technology moving towards the mainstream. The first mp3 codec was released in 1994, but it wasn’t until 2003 that the iTunes store opened. It took a few years more for commercial digital audio distribution to become the dominant retail channel for distributing audio. Even though the internet was born as and still remains primarily a textual medium, a viable digital alternative that can completely supplant the book for both consumers and scholars. One of the smallest of the difficulties to converting the printed corpus into machine readable formats may be the actual process technologically of converting text printed text to digital formats.

The foremost issue that will slow the replacement of the printed volume will be the copyrights attached to various books, whether they are in print or not. Between the variety and quantity of commercial presses and their imprints to the number of university and other academic presses hunting down and acquiring distribution rights for every book that may hold some value to any possible inquiry of value is Herculean and potentially impossible task. On top of this is the problem of making the text of a particular work available in formats that allow for using the book across a variety of reading devices is still another challenge. The legal issues surrounding Google Book Search are just now starting to gradually wind down will larger stakeholders settling claims, but the legal skirmishes attached to old yet copyrighted works still likely continue for quite a while.

Format, quality, and access are going to continue to be foundational reasons for maintaining physical books in libraries. The circulation of books to individuals as a free service is a library function yet to be replaced with a technological alternative that is operating on a widespread basis. This singular problem will likely keep books on the shelves of just about every major academic library (or library system for Universities that host many library locations for different population) and many community libraries. Community libraries may pare down their collections as they have often done to continue to keep their collections fresh while constrained by space limitation, but the library book sale has long been a tradition in many communities. What is new and will likely remain rare are book purges as undertaken a few years ago by the San Francisco library’s main branch when they dumped roughly 100,000 books. Back in 2004 Newsweek contrasted this against the design of the new Seattle library which preserved its collection. The fate of the print academic journal is a question that really does merit treatment on its own.

So as the resources of the library shift and libraries shift priorities in filling their roles in the communities they serve, the traditional library is far from dead. This may be a renaissance for the Librarian, information specialist, as they serve to guide patrons inundated with information from a variety of media to find quality material to address the patron’s curiosity or their problems. In an era often dubbed the information age the library and librarian may now be more valuable than ever.