Worse still, public librarians strike me as individually disengaged from the ongoing pricing debate. Anger over expensive content licenses, complacency in their young marriages with Overdrive and NetLibrary, and an almost fatalistic attitude about DRM–all of these are reasonable reactions to an issue that has probably exploded a dozen of my synapses. But as service strategies, they’re epic fails. To me, a library has a responsibility above all else to remain relevant to its community. In most cases, this will mean making like Roman gladiators and grappling with ebooks, no matter how ridiculous their cost, formats, or readers.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
