Searcher's Voice - Redundancy

Searcher's Voice - Redundancy

As information professionals, we have two primary — not to say, primal — goals the pursuit of which qualifies us as a profession. One is access, guaranteeing that our clients, which some might define as encompassing the human race (a definition Second Lifers might consider unduly limiting), attain all the truth they can use. But an even more basic goal is the guaranteeing that all information in existence stays in existence, the command to archive.
Over the millennia, an array of vendors have taken on much of that archiving responsibility. From traditional publishers to database aggregators to the mighty Google, centralized suppliers of content have gathered and winnowed the wheat from the chaff — through peer review in the case of scholarship, through editorial blue pencils in the case of general press. Librarians would collect the publications and store them for the future. In the case of generally nonsalable content, such as rare documents and arcana, librarians might provide special archiving services, including digitization.