1. Re: Google Books and metadata — I agree that Google seems to prefer programmatic solutions to crowdsourcing. But it seems like a missed opportunity to ignore the 100+ yrs of metadata work by academic librarians. Why can’t they use both? I’ve read that Google’s pulling in library records from their universities but that metadata problems persist. Again, this seems like the perfect opportunity to use human-generated (or -corrected) info as well as automated methods like Recaptcha.

2. Like many other librarians I read the Inside Higher Ed piece about Daniel Greenstein’s presentation with a mixture of dread and amusement. One thing that always nags me about many of these sweeping proclamations about the future of libraries is that they tend to treat The Library as a homogenous, monolithic entity. As you mentioned in the podcast, public libraries are bursting at the seams these days. And there’s real, true variation between academic libraries, the same way there’s variation between institutions of higher ed. The libraries at a major research university are not the same as the (usually single) library at a community college.

At the public, urban, commuter, technical college where I work, our library is BUSY. Students come to study and hang out, of course, but we also get a fair amount of traffic at the reference desk. And as you mention, library instruction/information literacy is an important (and growing) area in which academic librarians contribute to student learning. We may need less space for physical collections in our libraries in the future, but I think that the library as a learning space will continue to be valuable for a long time yet.

In any case, I appreciate your covering this issue. I think it’s such an important one that I don’t care how many times you revisit it!