First of all, I would like to disagree with your assumption that these efforts would "Reduce Digital Divide". Infact it will increase the divide as those who HAVE Digital Access will get more than HAVE-NOTs. Anyway, Digital Divide is a different problem; let us not mix it with Open Access. Now let us come to the problem of users visiting the Libraries. Ok, Whether We like it or not, but let us face it!! Fewer and fewer people would be visiting libraries for information. But the Question is how do we attract users to the Library. I think we need to understand our user more carefully now. Instead of asking, why the users are not visiting the library? We should rather ask, WHAT THE HELL BRINGS THIS USER TO THE LIBRARY?? Find out, why users are still coming to library, and then invest major portion of the resources to satisfy who still come. Thus Moral of the story is "GIVE! WHAT THEY WANT, NOT WHAT YOU WANT TO GIVE!!" Am I talking different than what "EVERY READER HIS/HER BOOK" says?. ---Sukhdev Singh On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 vasanth raj wrote :
Dear sir/madam/ friends,
We are all talking more about the open archive initiative , author self archiving, society driven archive, e-prints etc.... Yes its really reduce the barrier of " Digital divide". If very thing avialble on the web,author started to put their full text freely. Its very easy to access.But what about the libraries. Its certainly reduced the user's to visit library.How we can attract large number of users to library in this "Electronic Global Village"?.
Vasantha Raju N Dept. Library and Information science University of Mysore Mysore e-mail: gooche _1981@yahoo.co.in
First of all, I would like to disagree with your assumption that these efforts would "Reduce Digital Divide". Infact it will increase the divide as those who HAVE Digital Access will get more than HAVE-NOTs. Anyway, Digital Divide is a different problem; let us not mix it with Open Access. Now let us come to the problem of users visiting the Libraries. Ok, Whether We like it or not, but let us face it!! Fewer and fewer people would be visiting libraries for information. But the Question is how do we attract users to the Library. I think we need to understand our user more carefully now. Instead of asking, why the users are not visiting the library? We should rather ask, WHAT THE HELL BRINGS THIS USER TO THE LIBRARY?? Find out, why users are still coming to library, and then invest major portion of the resources to satisfy who still come. Thus Moral of the story is "GIVE! WHAT THEY WANT, NOT WHAT YOU WANT TO GIVE!!" Am I talking different than what "EVERY READER HIS/HER BOOK" says?. ---Sukhdev Singh On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 vasanth raj wrote :
Dear sir/madam/ friends,
We are all talking more about the open archive initiative , author self archiving, society driven archive, e-prints etc.... Yes its really reduce the barrier of " Digital divide". If very thing avialble on the web,author started to put their full text freely. Its very easy to access.But what about the libraries. Its certainly reduced the user's to visit library.How we can attract large number of users to library in this "Electronic Global Village"?.
Vasantha Raju N Dept. Library and Information science University of Mysore Mysore e-mail: gooche _1981@yahoo.co.in http://clients.rediff.com/signature/track_sig.asp http://ads.rediff.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.cgi/www.rediffmail.com/inbox...