>What I dislike here is your abnegation of the responsibility to care
>about the choices students make. If you're not considering the value
>of all resources-including the book-you're not playing the library
>game, the educator game or the Google game. You're just throwing stuff
>on screens because you can.

Tim, this appears to conflate the role of the reference librarian and
that of the library technologist. While some of us (myself included)
straddle these two roles, this list focuses exclusively on the latter.

I read your repeated commentary on this topic as a demand that if we
can't play your game (caring about the choices students make), let's not
play any game at all. I respectfully disagree. Let's start where we are
and iterate. Incremental, iterative improvement is much more powerful
that I would ever have suspected, even 10 months ago. So even if it's
"throwing stuff on screens because you can" (which doesn't sound
generous), let's start. We'll get someplace, I think. But only if we
play the game.

Here on code4lib, I'd rather get back to your very useful examples of
deadends [1][2]. Let's ask "Would this be useful in any context? "How
can we give our users more information without sending them spinning to
dead-ends?" Distinguishing between full-text links, partial-text links,
and pointers to more information is critical and unlike our 856 fields
[3], the GoogleBooks API *does* give us that information. The question
is how to present it to users. Tim, I hope you'll draw up an interface
suggestion, and send us a link to a screenshot.

Of course, I don't think that GoogleBooks is the be-all and end-all; we
need to be pulling information from various sources (and some on this
list have systems that already are). If you're concerned about that, why
not survey the landscape for other APIs--all the ones you can find--and
submit a paper to the Journal, write a blog post, or do up a prototype?
(Personally, I'd welcome such a collation from anybody!)

Unintended consequences are also worth further exploration, and I'm not
the only one[4] who'd love to see more studies of the consequences of
changing catalogs and changing online availability. Anything you can
contribute there--with real evidence of before and after--would be most
welcome as well.

-Jodi


[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=7ctpAAAACAAJ
[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=wLnGAAAACAAJ
[3] http://roytennant.com/proto/856/analysis.html
[4] http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/03/unintended-consequences.html
"When we make materials available, or when we make them more available
than they have been in the past, we aren't just providing more service
-- we are actually changing what knowledge will be created. We tend to
pay attention to what we are making available, but not to think about
how differing availability affects the work of our users."