Nov 24 video post

So obviously my internet issues have been resolved. My brother has been paid in beer, and internet life is back to normal here. I’m just glad I have him to help me, and that I don’t have to sit on the phone with tech support when I have a problem to solve. No matter how much I think I know about technology, somehow things are more complicated than I anticipated, and I have to call in the tech expert. This really makes us all beholden to them in a lot of ways.  Which might be a topic for another day. Anyway…

When I first started watching the Kindle video, I was very surprised at the way the DOJ was handling the Kindle pilot study. I kept thinking, if the universities don’t have any impaired students, how can they be violating their rights? But then the speaker from the DOJ talked, and it all became much more clear.  Essentially the DOJ had a problem with the Kindle, but didn’t have any way of making Amazon make the Kindle accessible. The DOJ seemed to hope that the universities would put pressure on Amazon, which in turn would convince Amazon to change. If the universities say they won’t buy the Kindle if it is not accessible, Amazon would be more likely to listen. Sad that money is what motivates companies to make accessible materials, but there it is.

I didn’t realize that the Kindle was inaccessible before watching this video. But since it does not have a talking menu, it would be hard for someone who is visually impaired to get to the text-to-speech function. And what seems silly to me is that there is technology out there to make the Kindle accessible, and Amazon is just not doing it. I don’t know what the reasons are for that, but I would be curious to find out. Is it just that Amazon doesn’t realize that the device is inaccessible? Is it that they don’t care? Or is it that the market share of visually impaired people is small enough that it doesn’t make financial sense for them to develop the technology?

The academic library video made me think a lot about digital management in the future. Who is going to be responsible for archiving and preserving all the digital data that is produced? Who decides which data is worthy of being saved, and which data is just fluff? And how will it be cataloged? Will it be searchable? Will there be a universal search catalog? If there is not, how will people find what they need?

In addition to that what will happen to print resources? Will there be major publications like journals or textbooks that will not be in print at all? What happens when those companies go out of business? Is the company responsible for maintaining those digital resources forever, or is someone else, like a library? At least with print material there is the physical print left behind.

These are all really big questions. And there may be answers for some of them that weren’t discussed here. But one thing seems clear. Until there are good answers, librarians need to keep on top of these issues, in order to help patrons find the information they need. The more uncertain the future, the more people will need experts who know more about what is going on. In some ways it seems that librarians will be in demand even more than they are now, but in slightly different ways. We will have to know where all that digital information is, how it is stored, and how to access it when it is needed.