On Demand Book Service

Hi Nira,

I totally get your concern, perhaps I should've prefaced that in the context of systems development, we would like to 'design' something that accommodates growth and longevity, a lot of the things that Bill brought up during the video conferencing. Those are not so much deliverables as a scope. For example, it's important that video and music is not implied in the 'mission statement', so that when we design the system, we focus on delivering 'books', or 'recorded histories', and not worry about delivery of music and other rich media content.

I hope that clarifies it a bit. The mission statement I suggested (and I just pulled it out of my head) is not for this class to accomplish, but a long term goal that will be executed years from now, but we need something that defines the distant future goal so we can tackle smaller objectives like small surveys, system prototypes, and securing at least some digital content.

Just some thoughts.

I'm a little concerned that in defining the scope of the ODBS we are going to fall into the pit of what used to be called "the fiction question". Librarians used to forbid or put restrictions on reading popular fiction, because such books were considered bad and they considered it for the public good the duty to cultivate good reading habits in the populations they served.

It is not up to us to decide what counts as a "good" book for these communities. For one thing what counts as "good" changes over time, for example Pride and Prejudice used to be considered trash by English scholars. We also have to avoid pidgeon-holing the users by only providing "appropriate" Aboriginal or Anishnawbe materials. The context of learning, education, knowledge sharing, and history recording does not have to be narrow. For example, Harlequin romances often have very good vocabulary and are set in historical periods that may have been formerly unknown to the reader, so it is better that someone reads romances than if they did not read at all. I first read about the Information Age theory and Foucault's surveilance theory in science fiction. Everyone is entitled to their own reading tastes. If it turns out that there is a demand for low-brow books, we have to accept that. The collection has to be broad enough to include popular genres and allow for reader experimentation or else we will loose their interest.

On the bright side of things, the survey questions really seem to be shaping up. Questions about what kinds of books people read or would like to read will really help us decide what our content should be. This is much better and easier than trying to guess by ourselves what content to get. I really hope we get a good response from participants.