Should Google Pay Librarians for their Work in Google Co-op Health
Yesterday, I posted an email from Howard Fuller, Stanford librarian, who is coordinating a group of qualified medical librarians to volunteer with Google Co-op Health. In Dean Giustini's recent post, he believes that Google, whose profits he compares to that of a "small country," should buck up and employ librarians like Microsoft. "Why can't Google hire some librarians like Microsoft does? It's a fair question: should professional librarians volunteer to do the work of the new knowledge economy for gratis? If our new graduates can't get decent salaries, from companies like Google we are in big trouble."
Interesting thought. I admit it never occurred to me. Librarians often complain we are not asked to participate in these type of endeavors, are we just too eager for our own good? Or do you think if we stand up for ourselves and asked to paid that they will seek our services from other professionals who will do it for free and leave us out of the loop? Are we in a damned if we do and damned if we don't scenario? This instance is with Google, but this happens elsewhere. What are your opinions?
2 Comments:
My opinions are that Google might benefit from the participation of librarians, but the nature of libraries precludes a need to employ professionals. They give things away, it's what they do. The professionalism of librarians aside, because libraries are no longer restrictive of knowledge or secretive of methodology, it's become very easy to construct, use, administer, and grow librarianless libraries, such as the internet, or the blogs, or the zines or whatever. Organizing information requires minimal technical expertise, and more passion and dedication. As Google seeks to construct yet another entrypoint for quality-checked information, librarians once again recognize they are no longer the gateway they once were. Expertise, passion, and skill for organizing information are three variable qualities, and there are a huge number of people with some mixture of all three. Some of them are willing to do the work for free, and the work they do may be inferior than the work of a hired professional, but not significantly so. We librarians are seeing our abilities and relevance slowly spread away from us.
Google is rich. Of course, they need to pay up for those who works for them. Labor should be paid! These librarians have devoted their time in participating, plus maybe sacrificing some of their personal time for it.
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