A Jail for Books

I enjoyed reading this article from today's Boston Globe about Dunster House, the oldest dormitory on the Harvard campus, which is known for its "ornate library with the chandelier, fireplace, and wood-paneled walls [which] has drawn students to its prized collection of classics, thousands of dust-covered tomes from Cicero to Twain." Because of thefts from the collection, which includes some "highly valuable volumes [and] irreplaceable first editions signed by authors," the administration decided to put "two brass bars ... across nearly every shelf, making the books impossible to peruse." If you look at the illustration, it looks as if the books have been put in jail. This "solution" is supposed to be temporary while the administration figures out what to do with the books, but in the meantime students are unhappy; they have "complained that the collection now seems just for looks, akin to a Potemkin village, and that there could have been other ways to protect the books while allowing students access." Note that the link to the Dunster House Library makes no mention of the fact that the collection is inaccessible, although the Harvard Crimson has publicized the situation. If the books are off limits, is this still a library?

New Building for CUNY Law School

The New York Law Journal is reporting that CUNY Law School will move into a new building in the fall of 2011. The story is below. As the story points out, the current facility at CUNY is notoriously hard to get to and has been inadequate since its founding. The new facility will be more accessible and will enable the school to expand its programs. Congratulations to the folks at CUNY!

Law School Moving to New NYC Campus in 2011

By Daniel Wise | New York Law Journal

The City University of New York School of Law will move to new quarters in fall 2011 under a resolution approved yesterday by the board of trustees. The school is expected to buy the lower six floors of a 14-story building owned by Citigroup at Court Square in Long Island City for $150 million. The acquisition will give the school an added 70,000 square feet for a new part-time program aimed at older adults and students from working-class backgrounds.

Since its founding in 1983, CUNY Law has been located in a former junior high school in Flushing, Queens. That building, at 150,000 square feet, is "bursting at the seams" and difficult to reach by public transportation, according to Dean Michelle J. Anderson. The new location is within walking distance to subway and bus lines, the Long Island Railroad and a state Supreme Court building.

The school will make a $50 million down payment with funds appropriated in 2008 by state lawmakers for construction of a new building, according to CUNY Law spokesman Michael Arena. The balance will be financed with either tax-exempt bonds or federal stimulus money, he added. Citigroup's proposal that the school purchase the floors as a condominium was the most attractive of several proposals received in response to a formal request. It would have cost $250 million to build a new school from scratch, Mr. Arena said.

CUNY has approximately 390 students.

Library Catalogs Getting Serious Upgrade

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a wonderful article in its Sept. 28, 2009 issue, Technology section and online here "After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software."

...traditional online library catalogs don't tend to order search results by ranked relevance, and they can befuddle users with clunky interfaces. (snip)

That's changing because of two technology trends. First, a growing number of universities are shelling out serious money for sophisticated software that makes exploring their collections more like the easy-to-filter experience you might find in an online Sears catalog.

Second, Virginia and several other colleges, including Villanova University and the University of Rochester, are producing free open-source programs that tackle the same problems with no licensing fees.

A key feature of this software genre is that it helps you make sense of data through "faceted" searching, common when you shop online for a new jacket or a stereo system. Say you type in "Susan B. Anthony." The new system will ask if you want books by her or about her, said Susan L. Gibbons, vice provost and dean of Rochester's River Campus Libraries. Users can also sort by media type, language, and date.

These products can also rank search results by relevance and use prompts of "Did you mean … ?"

"It's sort of our answer to, Why it is you need a library when you have Google?" said Ms. Gibbons. "What this is going to do is show how much you've been missing."

It's a pressing issue. Libraries once had a monopoly on organizing data about content. No longer. And today some users gripe about how libraries present materials online: how scattered they are, how sluggish searches can be, and how often those searches are useful only if you already know exactly what you want.

The worry for Jennifer Bowen, assistant dean of the River Campus Libraries, is that library catalogs could become "marginalized."

"There are people who just cannot find what they need," she said. "And they're just sort of giving up on libraries."

The article points to a survey by Ithaka (the non-profit group referred to in Marie's post, just below this one), which specializes in promoting technology in higher education. The study found faculty members to decreasingly dependent on the library for their research, and increasingly ambivalent about the value of libraries. Boy, is that bad news for libraries!

According to the article, librarians are now seeking to develop "Web-scale index searching," which is the new holy grail, taking the place of our last goal, "federated searching." Where federated searching tried to pull all our collections together for a single point search, yet it skipped going through a centralized index, and searched individual databases separately. With the new "web-scale index searching," there is a single point search of the entire collection, but like Google, the system is searching a centralized index created from all the databases, books, articles, and all digital objects. At this point, it is a goal, not a reality. But the idea is to break down the silos that make searching for information in the library such a frustration to our users.

The new products are coming online, and are called "next-generation catalogs" or "discovery interfaces." Some librarians consider them dumbed-down versions of the traditional catalog. The new search interfaces don't require the user to understand the difference between monographs and serials, for instance.

Encore, from Innovative Interfaces, adopted by at least 44 academic libraries in the United States, according to Mr.[Marshall] Breeding's [director of innovative technology and research at the Vanderbilt University library,] tally; AquaBrowser, from Media lab Solutions, used by 23 libraries; and Primo, from Ex Libris, adopted by 13 libraries.

How much institutions will have to pay for new commercial systems will vary depending on both what comes with the software and the size and complexity of the library. That could mean a price as low as $10,000 for a small academic library to one in the $100,000 range for a much larger one, Mr. Breeding said.

A 'Shift of Power'

In the open-source world, at least 10 academic libraries have turned to VuFind, which originated at Villanova. Virginia's Blacklight, with Stanford University as a development partner, is in a beta phase. And Rochester's eXtensible Catalog, or XC, backed by $1.2-million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will be rolled out in the spring.

The shift from commercial products to open-source ones is about more than money, though.

Bess Sadler, chief architect of the online library environment at the University of Virginia, sees the open-source Blacklight project as a "shift of power," as she wrote recently in the journal Library Hi Tech. The idea is that libraries, which know their local needs, should control the technology that patrons use to gain access to their collections. That's a change from the one-size-is-good-enough-for-everybody, commercially managed model that has prevailed in the industry.

The ability to customize is important when it comes to something like a music collection. A librarian might get this question: "I play the guitar. My boyfriend plays the flute. What duets can we play together?" In the past, even though Virginia had cataloged the instruments used in all of its sheet music, a search of that information was impossible because the fields that were indexed were maintained by a vendor, Ms. Sadler said.

"The problem with a vendor solution is that it's hard for vendors to tailor that solution for different collections, for different user populations, for different specializations," she said.

With an open-source system, a library can set its own relevance rankings and adjust them based on what users want. By maintaining the system itself, Virginia is now able to search by musical instrument.

The downside is libraries need someone on staff who can install and maintain the open-source program. So far, vendors aren't supporting products like VuFind the way they support established open-source products like Koha and Evergreen, both integrated library systems, said Mr. Breeding. Vendors will install software like Evergreen, host it on their own servers, and provide a help desk that you can call if something breaks. Not so for the newer software. Another barrier is going to be trusting that an open-source project is sustainable. There is always a concern that there will not be a community of users to keep developing it.

Also, the open-source systems have been slower to fold in article-level data, Mr. Breeding said. Most of that action is on the commercial side.

With Blacklight, you won't be able to get individual journal articles. If you're doing research on cell division, for example, a search will tell you that Virginia subscribes to the journal about cell division, but you'll have to go to a journal database for the article.

"That's going to be true for a very long time," Ms. Sadler said. "For the foreseeable future, you're going to need to go to separate interfaces in order to search licensed content."

But commercial vendors, smelling a new market, are stepping in. Serials Solutions, a subsidiary of ProQuest, released a software product in July called Summon. The company has been negotiating deals with publishers and content providers to create a searchable index of their content. It's like Google, except what Summon provides is an index of the "deep Web" of paid content. So now university libraries that pay for a subscription to Summon can let their users search their licensed content as well as locally owned stuff, together. Summon has 17 customers so far, including Arizona State University and Dartmouth College.

The catch? It can be expensive.

The hope is that libraries can recapture the markets that we are losing to Google and other search engines on the Web. We hope the better interfaces will help us make the most of the expensive databases and materials that we purchase for our users, making them more easily accessible to them, more searchable. But the problems to be solved are very tricky. We have to work with vendors and/or our own programmers, and whatever the solution, it will certainly cost a good deal. Either we will have to pay for a turn-key operation, or for in-house maintenance and tweaking. Perhaps we will have to pay for some of both.

But if we truly are able to make our catalogs as attractive and easy-to use as Google, and as intuitive, that might be worth a good deal! It would be re-investing in the money already spent on the collections, and on the man-hours devoted over the decades to organizing the meta-data that is our vast array of cataloging records. If we can afford it... I think it would be worth every penny.

Withdrawing Print Titles

Ithaka has issued a new report entitled What to Withdraw? Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization. Its goal is to help libraries that want to recapture the space made available when digitized journals are discarded. To quote from the executive summary, "this report addresses two key questions: which types of print journals can libraries withdraw responsibly today, and how can that set of materials be expanded to allow libraries the maximum possible flexibility?" For journals with reliable digital access, retaining the print serves primarily a preservation function. There are other reasons for retaining print: "the need to fix scanning errors; insufficient reliabilty of the digital provider; inadequate preservation of the digitized versions; the presence of significant quantities of important non-textual material that may be poorly represented in digital form; and campus political considerations." The situation will be different in each library, but it is safe to say that "many of the rationales for retaining print are likely to decline over the course of time." The report concludes that most journals do not meet the criteria for withdrawal at this time, but that several strategies should be put in place to increase the number of journals that do:

First, organizations pursuing digitization projects should [be] more transparent about their standards and practices. Second, when digitization quality is low, it should be upgraded over the course of time. Finally, the library community should aggregate the work of exisiting mechanisms for print storage, de-duplication, and preservation, so that print repositories can more effectively contribute to a system-wide withdrawals strategy.

We have moved all but the last ten years of our periodicals to offsite storage (still on our campus, however) in order to free up shelf space in our main building. It was HeinOnline that enabled us to do this. HeinOnline is a reliable provider of high-quality digital access to periodicals, and thus addresses most of the concerns about retaining print set out above. Nonetheless, I have not yet made the decision to withdraw any periodicals permanently from the collection based on the availability of HeinOnline, but that day will probably come sooner rather than later. We are making decisions about which new law reviews to purchase based on their availability on HeinOnline, LexisNexis, and/or Westlaw. The cost is not our main concern, as academic law reviews are cheap; our main concern is space, which is a problem of long standing at our library.

How much have students really changed?

I went today to our university's Center for Teaching Excellence for a book group meeting. Part of the conversation turned to the Kindle. The group leader said she had talked to her undergraduate students last night about the Kindle and asked how many had one. None of them owned a Kindle, and a few asked what one was. She was amazed. She said, "Don't you like to read online?" They told her they really liked to hold books! She said, "What gets in the way of learning when we read?" They answered, "When we don't know the meaning of a word." She told them that when you click on a word in the Kindle, it automatically calls up the definition in an online dictionary. They were interested, but not sold. They still preferred to read in books. They said they liked the "feel and touch of books." Our leader said she thought it was resistance to change. I am not sure she is right. I think maybe the Kindle is just not ready for prime time, and the students are too savvy to be stampeded by glitz.

I wonder. The article in the Boston Globe about the school that emptied its library of books, and bought a handful of Kindles, a flat screen T.V. and an expensive coffee machine garnered 490 comments on the Globe website, boston.com (the link above to the article takes you there). By far the majority of the comments decry the Cushing Academy's decision to remove books entirely from the library. A group of school library associations had their presidents compose a letter strongly opposing the Cushing Academy model, posted here, at OOTJ. (I can't help but note a comment saying that the Globe article overstates what happened at Cushing -- that they did not actually get rid of all their books, just supplemented them with electronics... hmm it would not be the first time a journalist overstated something to get a more spectacular story). The Globe ran a first person essay just yesterday that keyed off the Cushing story to reflect on the Kindle versus book controversy.

This is by way of introducing my latest quandary. I am experimenting with a Sony Recorder that can upload the recording to a computer for editing and processing. I am using it to comment on student papers rather than writing notes in the margins. I write a number in the margin, instead, and say the number, and then make my comments on the recording. I will load each commentary on a thumbdrive and give it to the student with the paper. Each paper has a short set of final comments and a grade, but the lengthy comments in the text are replaced with numbers and a recorded commentary.

My arthritic hands feel much better. My froggy throat is worn out. But, I am wondering whether the students will be happy with the comments they get. I would be driven to distraction by the set-up. But I am not the same generation. I was happy to believe my colleagues in the 1-L writing program who have been doing this for several years and claim their students love this feed-back. But when I mentioned what I was doing this Sunday to my 19 year old daughter and 24 year old son, they both thought it would make them crazy to get feedback like that. I will have to ask the students after they have time to mull the experience.

Some of the recent experiences that have come my way make me question all the things I have been told about the differences between me and younger folks. Maybe, on some things, our preferences are not so far apart. It probably depends on the issue.

Right to Know Day (FOIA and all that jazz)

Monday, Sept. 28 is International Right to Know Day!

International Right to Know Day was established by access to information advocates from around the globe. It was first celebrated on 28 September 2003, and 2009 will see the 7th International Right to Know Day.

The aim of Right to Know Day is to raise awareness of every individual's right of access to government-held information: the right to know how elected officials are exercising power and how the tax-payers' money is being spent. (snip)

What You Can Do
if you are an NGO / civil society organization ... hold an event, a debate, an award ceremony .... write a press release ... hold a discussion with a local community group or in the local school ... print up posters and t-shirts and hand them out in the streets ... get people involved and, best of all, get them exercising their rights by filing request for information!

if you are an individual ... file a request for information, write a letter to your local newspaper, ask your local town hall to put up notices telling people about the right to information, or ask them to put more information on their website ... write to your local council or to your member of parliament and ask them what they are doing to promote government transparency!

if you are a teacher or pupil ... have a discussion in class about the right to know and why open government is important ... think of some requests you can file with your local authority or with a government body such as the Ministry of Education ... find a local issue that you would like to know more about such as the quality of the drinking water or the budget for the sports centre and file requests for more information!

if you are a librarian or write an Internet blog ... you already understand the value of information, so make sure you inform your members/readers about Right to Know Day!

(from the FOIA Advocates' International Right to Know Day website... There is lots more there, most especially including a wonderful Resources page with excellent links to organizations, Guides, Toolkits, Papers, and a link to selected cases on access to government information litigation from Bulgaria. I am guessing that this section is growing so it's worth checking back. Bookmark it!

And, even more useful than the Right To Know Day website, the Journal Governance is giving free online access to an excellent article on the right to know litigation: Cary Coglianese*, The Transparency President? The Obama Administration and Open Government, Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions

ABSTRACT

President Obama has trumpeted transparency as a major part of his agenda, promising "unprecedented" openness throughout the federal government. Although Obama benefits politically from the contrast with his predecessor's reputation for secrecy, in the long run an excessive emphasis on fishbowl governance can raise unrealistic expectations and ultimately backfire. After all, at some point transparency has its costs, such as when disclosure dampens internal deliberation or undermines privacy. The real issue, then, is how much transparency and what type. Despite its rhetoric, the Obama Administration has placed limits on transparency and will likely continue to do so. Yet members of the public and open government activists are unlikely to appreciate the need for such limits, leading to disappointment and charges of hypocrisy. It remains unclear whether Barack Obama will earn the mantle of the "transparency president"—or whether the hopes he has raised will, when unfulfilled, only reinforce public cynicism.

*University of Pennsylvania

Tip of the OOTJ hat to my wonderful Suffolk colleague, Alasdair Roberts, who edits the journal, and passed all this information along to his colleagues.

Legal Jobs Outlook Roundup

Putting together several ABA articles today, the legal jobs outlook is maybe not as grim as before. It depends on the geography and practice area, and the job hunter's credentials (which is always the case, I suppose). Here are the links & how I put them together in my crystal ball:

Look first at Above the Law and "Last Week in Layoffs" for the real scoop on what's happening on the street the week of September 21, 2009. There seems to be a slowdown in the layoffs, with only one firm, British IP firm Marks & Clerk laying off nine lawyers and 51 staff. However, the real pain is in the job offers to summer clerks. Above the Law ran a story Sept. 15 titled Nationwide No Offer Watch, and the same day ran a story on Baker and McKenzie deferring job offers. And of course, check the Lawschucks Layoff Tracker.

There was a sort of misleading ABA article, "Worst of the Recession is Over" referring to a PricewaterhouseCooper Survey. A survey of more than 50 law firms found that, partly due to the serious cost-cutting measures, firms are starting to see their profits tick back up in the three months April - July, 2009. Real estate is still doing poorly, but corporate mergers and acquisitions is starting to perk back up. However, the ABA article includes a link to the British legal magazine, the Law Society Gazette, which ran the original article. This article reveals that the survey is looking entirely at British firms:

PwC’s quarterly benchmarking survey showed an 18% rise in profits per equity partner (PEP) since January at the 10 largest firms, and a 41% surge at the top 11 to 25 firms. Profit margins also saw a boost in firms of all sizes.

In the meantime, there is also a cautionary tale in the ABA online. The brief article refers the reader to an online article at lawjobs.com Career Center by two legal search firm partners, Deborah Ben-Canaan and Martha Fay Africa (who was also formerly the director of placement at U.C., Berkeley).

According to a CareerBuilder.com survey of hiring managers and employees (and based on the other surveys we've seen, these are extremely conservative estimates), 18 percent of candidates lied about their skill set and 7 percent lied about the companies they had worked for. Over the years, our experience has led us to the same unfortunate conclusion -- there are far too many occurrences of resume falsification. Some recent examples include:

• A candidate whose resume was exemplary; she was charming, professional and ultimately was a finalist for a general counsel position. A review of her resumes from earlier years, however, turned up several inconsistencies: a) different law firms showed up on different versions; b) employment years were changed; and c) the candidate had actually passed the California Bar much later than reflected in her resume. The candidate was pulled from the finalist spot.

• A candidate with stellar credentials was looking for an in-house position. He added a year onto his law firm experience, but neglected to mention that one of those years was spent as a summer clerk, and not as an associate. Additionally, the candidate indicated that he had two jobs at the same time, and upon further probing, it came out that he was only an intern in one of the positions.

• A candidate was looking for an in-house position. He morphed his solo practitioner experience working on some small matters for a computer company into an item on his resume that stated that he was actually employed inside that company. (snip)

Candidates may think that stretching the truth a little bit is not a big deal, but it is. We have heard lawyers tell us that they only worked in a job for a few months, so they left it off their resume, or they had a bad experience in that job, so it was left off the resume and then dates were stretched to cover any resume "gaps." This is deceit, plain and simple.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

These types of career blunders can put a black mark on your reputation in more ways than one. If you are already employed and your employer finds out that they were deceived about your experience, you can lose your job. If you are in a high-level position, this also may mean unwanted publicity.

For instance, Michael Brown, the former FEMA director, was relieved of his management duties following Hurricane Katrina and resigned three days later amid allegations that he had falsified portions of his resume. And in a case much closer to home, the California Commission on Judicial Performance removed Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Patrick Couwenberg from the bench after finding him guilty of willful misconduct in office, conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice and improper action under the state Constitution. "He lied to become a judge, elaborated on his misrepresentation for his enrobing ceremony and subsequently lied to the commission in an apparent attempt to frustrate its investigation," according to the commission's report. Couwenberg had misrepresented both his academic and military background, claiming, among other things, that he had been a corporal in the U.S. Army, received a Purple Heart, participated in covert operations in southeast Asia, attended Loyola Law School and worked at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher -- none of which was true. During the proceedings, Couwenberg's attorney said his client suffers from "pseudologia fantastica," a mental condition in which the person engages in habitual or compulsive lying. (snip)

This is a tough economy and people are taking drastic actions to get themselves noticed. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right? Wrong. There is never a time when duplicity or "stretching the truth" is appropriate. In fact, we believe that in this candidate-rich economy, truthfulness, morality and ethics become even more important. The competition is fierce, and one misstep can make you a damaged commodity. If anything, this is the time to become more scrupulous about how you present yourself.

DO'S AND DON'TS

So before you send in your resume for that perfect job, consider how you are presenting yourself. Are you being completely honest? An honest resume is neither exaggerated nor deceptively vague. Below are a few of our recommendations:

• Do be 100 percent accurate and complete with regard to all facts; remember that they can be easily confirmed. These include start dates, titles, employers, GPAs and Bar numbers (especially if you have a different/married last name now and your name isn't easily searchable on Bar records).

• Do describe your accomplishments. Be specific.

• Do tailor your resume specifically to each job for which you are applying. This is a key resume technique. But remember to illuminate your strengths through accurate descriptions rather than fabrication.

• Don't leave dates off a resume.

• Don't leave jobs off a resume.

• Don't embellish accomplishments or titles; make it clear when a given title was in effect.

• Don't claim a proficiency in a foreign language or other valuable skill unless you have it.

• Don't puff or overuse effusive adjectives.

If you are not sure how something will be perceived, ask the recruiter you are working with to help you. The key is to set yourself apart, while being able to back up everything you are selling. Remember, if you always tell the truth, you never have to remember which lie you told! Truth is your ally.

Obama's Judges

Jeffrey Toobin has written a trenchant analysis of President Obama's judicial-selection process in the September 21, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. Toobin discusses the difficulty of choosing candidates who will be successful in the confirmation process, and notes that "the only Obama nominee who has been confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship is [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor." Obama has nominated seven individuals to the federal appeals courts, and ten individuals to the federal district courts. As Toobin says, "vacancies abound," but bringing Obama's nominees to a vote has proved to be impossible in today's highly partisan Senate. He also questions whether Obama's picks are really liberals, pointing to the "post-partisan language of the White House [which] sounded a lot like that of traditional judicial conservatism." Toobin points to White House statements extolling Sotomayor as "'a nonideological and restrained judge'"; emphasizing that she "'wrote expressly about the importance of judicial restraint' in her Senate questionnaire when she became a circuit-court judge'"; and stating that "her opinions 'reflect a keen understanding of the appropriate limits of the judicial role.'" To Toobin, the White House statements and Sotomayor's recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee "amounted to an acknowledgement that conservative rhetoric [about judicial restraint], if not conservative views, had become the default mode for Supreme Court nominees." It is possible that "the use of conservative language by Sotomayor and her allies was merely an attempt to forestall Republican opposition," which was, of course, futile in the end as most Republicans voted not to confirm her. The article provides a fascinating insight into the recent history of the federal courts, and is must reading for anyone interested in how the judiciary might evolve under President Obama.

Google Books Settlement Fairness Hearing Postponed (again!)

Bookseller.com reports that U.S. Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers have asked the court to once again postpone the Fairness Hearing in the Google Books Settlement in order for these parties to consider and respond to the points made by the Justice Department in their Statement of Interest. They ask for a status conference to be held on November 6. Unless Judge Chin grants this request for an extension, the current deadline for his decision about the Settlement is October 7. In the earlier blogpost about the DOJ comments, recall that the Justice Department had real concerns about due process and antitrust problems with the Settlement, but was very supportive of the Project overall. They actually said they did not want the Google Books Project to lose momentum. They simply want the judge to think carefully about structuring the Settlement in ways that address the concerns the DOJ raises.

Future of Academic Libraries?

Librarians reacted "coolly" to a presentation by Daniel Greenstein, Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Programs at the University of California. The presentation was part of a meeting on sustainable scholarship sponsored by the Ithaka group. Greenstein's presentation was the subject of an article in Inside Higher Ed. According to Greenstein, the "university library of the future will be sparsely staffed, highly decentralized, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas." He believes that outsourcing some library functions is the answer to universities whose budgets have been hit hard by the economic downturn. Cataloging, for instance, could be shared among universities or "contracted out to providers such as Google." Collections could shrink as libraries share repositories of print and digital materials, which will save space and money. Ultimately, as "individual libraries' archives and services shrink ... so will their staffs."

I can understand why the audience's reaction was cool. Greenstein's presentation completely missed what libraries are actually about these days. He seems to think librarians are presiding over book museums, when in fact a majority of our time is spent teaching students how to use resources in all formats, proactively supporting faculty scholarship, creating user guides, getting involved with and supporting educational technology, and generally anticipating and meeting the needs of our communities. Outsourcing cataloging really bothers me, in particular the notion of outsourcing cataloging to Google given their track record with metadata. Furthermore, I have worked with cataloging provided by vendors, and rarely is it up to the standards that we have set for our library. Outsourcing sounds like a great idea to administrators until they realize how much control over the process they have lost. It can also be more expensive than anticipated. I think that Greenstein does not understand that libraries today should be judged by the quality of the services they offer, and that is dependent to a great degree on the quality of the staff.