SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
EXPLORE +
  • About infoDOCKET
  • Academic Libraries on LJ
  • Research on LJ
  • News on LJ
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Libraries
    • Academic Libraries
    • Government Libraries
    • National Libraries
    • Public Libraries
  • Companies (Publishers/Vendors)
    • EBSCO
    • Elsevier
    • Ex Libris
    • Frontiers
    • Gale
    • PLOS
    • Scholastic
  • New Resources
    • Dashboards
    • Data Files
    • Digital Collections
    • Digital Preservation
    • Interactive Tools
    • Maps
    • Other
    • Podcasts
    • Productivity
  • New Research
    • Conference Presentations
    • Journal Articles
    • Lecture
    • New Issue
    • Reports
  • Topics
    • Archives & Special Collections
    • Associations & Organizations
    • Awards
    • Funding
    • Interviews
    • Jobs
    • Management & Leadership
    • News
    • Patrons & Users
    • Preservation
    • Profiles
    • Publishing
    • Roundup
    • Scholarly Communications
      • Open Access

March 4, 2012 by Gary Price

Interview: Martin Gomez (Formerly Director at LA Public) on "Creating the Public Library of the Future"

March 4, 2012 by Gary Price

Martin Gomez spoke at the U. of Toronto last week and also chatted with Michael Posner from The Globe and Mail about the Digital Public Library of America.
From the Interview:

For several years, Martin Gomez has been actively promoting the Digital Public Library of America – a campaign to digitize inventories of cultural and scientific records and make them available to everyone, online – in effect, creating the public library of the future. Until this month, he served as general manager of Los Angeles’ public library system, overseeing 72 branches, 1,100 employees, and an annual budget of $129-million. He resigned recently to take a new job as vice-dean of libraries at the University of Southern California. Mr. Gomez was in Toronto this week to appear at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

Here are Two Exchanges from the Interview:

Globe and Mail: What are the principal obstacles you face?
Gomez: There are issues around copyright and public domain. In e-publishing, a lot of big publishers are unwilling to sell or license current publications to libraries, so we are shut out of that market. And a lot of communities are not well versed in how to use digital content. Libraries could become a hub for teaching those skills – both how to discern and interpret information, and to provide tools to help create digital content.
[Clip]
Globe and Mail: Who’s backing this venture financially?
Gomez: Two huge foundations are funding it, just to get the ball rolling. But over time, public libraries will have to shift resources for these purposes. That will be tricky, because we still have a large constituency that supports the traditional role. I’m not saying we need to throw that out, but there is also a younger generation more adept at using digital devices to get information. We need to be where they are. Public libraries could pay a subscription fee to be a member, so the expense would be nominal for local communities. That’s one model.

See Also: Los Angeles City Librarian Martin Gomez Leaving LAPL for Vice Dean Position at USC (INFOdocket, Feb. 12, 2012)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding, Interviews, Libraries, Profiles, Public Libraries, Publishing, Resources

SHARE:

DigitizationDigitized Archives & LibrariesDPLALibrary OrganizationsMartin Gomez

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Job Zone

ADVERTISEMENT

Recent Articles on LJ

On Critical Cataloging: Q&A with Treshani Perera | Equity

DEI Audits: The Whole Picture | Equity

Positioned for Power: Hiring an EDI Officer | Equity

Dartmouth Repatriates Samson Occom Papers to Mohegan Tribe

Proud Boys Disrupt Drag Queen Story Time at San Lorenzo Library

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Infodocket Posts

E-Books: Macmillan Announces New Lending Model For Libraries; ALA Denounces Change in Statement

All Updates Available at the Bottom of This Post (Latest Update: October 30, 2019)  October 30, 2019 ALA Releases Response to Letter by Macmillan CEO October 29, 2019 Letter From ...

Metadata: Seven Publishers Will Make an ORCID ID a Requirement For Publication; Springer Nature Reaches ORCID Milestone

Two items in this post. 1. Seven Publishers Making ORCID ID a Requirement For Publication A group of seven publishers today announced that, during 2016, they will begin requiring authors ...

Scholarly Publishing: PeerJ Launches Open Access Journal and Preprint Server (Roundup)

Here’s a roundup of some of today’s PeerJ launch coverage. + New OA Journal, Backed by O’Reilly, May Disrupt Academic Publishing (by Michael Kelley, Library Journal) PeerJ will do without ...

Crowdfunded eBooks: Unglue.it Is Live!

As we noted on Tuesday, Eric Hellman and his team (including librarian Andromeda Yelton) were planning to launch their Unglue.it crowdfunded ebook platform today. The platform is now live! Here’s ...

Google Book Settlement Rejected: Press Review, Comments, and Resources

UPDATED (March 27, 2011, 10:30pm EDST) Recent Additions “Doing Google Books Right” (by David Weinberger, Joho the Blog) Now it seems it’ll be up to Congress to address the orphaned ...

New Research: "Massive Study Reveals Editorial Bias and Nepotism in Biomedical Journals"

Update: Interview With Article Co-Authors (via The Scientist) From the Public Library of Science: Scientific journals are expected to consider research manuscripts dispassionately and without favor. But in a study ...

More Than 7,100 Participate in the 107th and Final ALA Midwinter Meeting

Here’s the Full Text of an ALA Release about 2021 Midwinter. The American Library Association hosted the 107th and final Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits online Jan. 22-26, 2021. The event ...

SAGE Announces a Pilot Open Access Publishing Program with UNC Chapel Hill University Libraries

From a SAGE News Release: SAGE Publishing today announces an open access pilot program with the University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Beginning in 2020, ...

Interview: Heather Paxson, Interim Head of MIT Anthropology, on a New Model for Open-Access Publishing in Anthropology

From MIT News: Publishers, librarians, research funders, and leaders from across the field of anthropology — including journal editors and representatives of the major Anglophone anthropological societies of both Europe ...

Interview: New eLife Editor Michael Eisen Comments on U. of California/Elsevier Situation

From UC Berkeley News: Michael Eisen, a professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has done his part to disrupt the stodgy business, which ...

Marc Andreessen and His Wife are Partnering With HP to Donate Computers to Baltimore and Ferguson Libraries

From the USA Today: Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen [also developer of Mozilla (first visual web browser) that became Netscape where he was co-founder] and the and his wife, philanthropist and ...

New Article: "Disrupting The Subscription Journals' Business Model For The Necessary Large-Scale Transformation To Open Access"

Here’s an announcement/summary of a new article written by researchers from the Max Planck Digital Library. From the Announcement: The Max Planck Digital Library has put forward a study on ...

ADVERTISEMENT

FOLLOW INFODOCKET ON TWITTER

Tweets by @infodocket

ADVERTISEMENT

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • Programs+
  • Design
  • Leadership
  • People
  • COVID-19
  • Advocacy
  • Opinion
  • INFOdocket
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Booklists
  • Prepub Alert
  • Book Pulse
  • Media
  • Readers' Advisory
  • Self-Published Books
  • Review Submissions
  • Review for LJ

Awards

  • Library of the Year
  • Librarian of the Year
  • Movers & Shakers 2022
  • Paralibrarian of the Year
  • Best Small Library
  • Marketer of the Year
  • All Awards Guidelines
  • Community Impact Prize

Resources

  • LJ Index/Star Libraries
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies

Events & PD

  • Online Courses
  • In-Person Events
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Submit Features/News
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Careers at MSI


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.