Drafted: I Want You To Deliver E-Government

Read the article here.

I predict enormous pushback in coming years in regards to this issue. Well, I'm hoping for enormous pushback. While it's great that libraries are filling this need, it seems to me that we're doing a free favor for government systems as they push more of their services into the realm of DIY. I think we, as librarians and citizens, should push for both government funding and specialized training for librarians from government. It's clear that facilitation is needed as people attempt to navigate these sites and meet their own needs.

Incidentally, when we talked about the development of the American library systems in school, one of the points is that the reason we developed a system of locally funded and locally controlled libraries was primarily due to Andrew Carnegie's stepping in with seed money that had to be matched by communities that wanted to start a library. My professor maintained that the government would have had to step in to start libraries, but it would have been much delayed and different. I've often played around a bit with what the library would look like if he hadn't stepped in: librarianship would have been a male-dominated profession, libraries would be pretty poorly funded to begin with but would have picked up lots of money during the Depression as opposed to the Sputnik era, they would have been devoted to the delivery of educational and governmental materials but not popular materials.