no clever title

One of my fatal flaws is that I have too many interests...and I take such a scattershot approach that I know a little about a lot and not much about everything.

I've been browsing the ebook arena (google vs. copyright), various readers, metadata and more and just wrote the following email to a colleague who attended library school at the same time I did and who is getting ready to retire from SIU-C. (He also happens to be my ex-):

I remember virtually nothing about being in Library School...and it's not just because it was 30 years ago...my memory has always been full of holes and traps...I don't remember vast stretches of time and I do remember stupid stuff like Janine's birthday. My question is this: had metadata been invented yet when we were in grad school. I mean, I know it had been invented...cataloging is all about metadata...but I don't remember much about the cataloging class except AACR2 Chapter 6. Did the faculty ever talk about metadata?

This is kind of important to me...have you been following the big Google Books bruhaha? Google is going to become the "world's largest library" by scanning all the books in the world so everyone with a net connection will have access to them. Sounds good, non? Non! For one thing, they are screwing around with copyright law and pissing off various and assorted people. You can read the comments of the Judiciary Committee here http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_090910.html. Pay special attention to Marybeth Peters. For another, Google's quality control sucks. They haven't been following up after the books are scanned and while most of them are legible and complete (except for the ones that are not full text on purpose) sometimes you run across blank pages and other problems that are really frustrating. Also, because much of the scanning was done by amateurs (just like many of the things that were input into Project Gutenberg years before) things are mislabeled, misidentified, and generally not great. (Bad metadata). Even so, it is easier to find things on Google than it is in some library catalogs. (Eric Rumsey, U of Iowa, has a post dealing with Library Catalog Fail here: http://tiny.cc/DQE64 ) (btw the book he uses, Everything is Miscellaneous is excellent and the blog of the same name is interesting as well.)

I've been playing around with this more because I got hooked on reading and tweeting a guy named Mike Cane who is kind of curmudgeonly but who has gotten me to think very hard about some of these things. He hasn't convinced me to buy an iphone yet (neither has Steve Jobs) but he's pretty much convinced me that the dedicated e-reader is not the way to go. I was already convinced, my Acer kicks butt...and I have very little trouble reading on it (except on the bus). I haven't successfully managed to get a readable book on my blackberry, but that's probably UE (user error).

In any case, it's time to go back to looking for missing books.