The tragedy of digitisation

The drive to modernisation that encourages ever faster investment in the latest technology is particularly pronounced among librarians. However, embracing digital technology does have some disadvantages, particularly in terms of the ownership of collections, controlling access to resources, and an over-reliance on statistics in managing libraries, among others. Today’s librarians should prepare for tomorrow by studying the rich lessons of the past, learning to resist the allure of technology and commercial and media pressures which see advances in computing as inherently good: librarians should rather be evaluating them in terms of usefulness.
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