Is This 'Gormangate'? ALA President-Elect Draws Fire

摘要

Three months before taking office, American Library Association (ALA) president-elect Michael Gorman has touched off a firestorm by taking on bloggers in the pages of Library Journal. At press time, Gorman's "Revenge of the Blog People" (BackTalk, LJ 2/15/05, p. 44) had librarians and bloggers-from within and outside the library community-buzzing, with over 1000 responses on popular technology site Slashdot.org. In addition, emails poured in to LJ and to Gorman himself, who received more than a hundred responses. [For more, see Editorial, p. 8, and Feedback, p. 12.] Gorman's BackTalk piece was motivated by bloggers' heated response to his December 17 op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times that questioned Google's digitization initiatives. Unfortunately for Gorman, his colorful rhetoric in responding to his critics was largely seen as an attack on Hogging. Rather than advancing the discussion of Google's usefulness, Gorman instead ignited a discussion about whether ALA, Gorman, or libraries in general are out of touch with technology.