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November 16, 2007
Thoughts on the "Patchwork" Library of the Web
The New Yorker‘s Anthony Grafton begins a rumination on the future of the library by evoking “an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom.” Now that many librarians are tasked with putting books online, not just depositing them in stacks, is that notion of the library as public space still resonant?
Mr. Grafton attempts to answer that question by tracing the intellectual history of Google’s and Microsoft’s library-scanning projects all the way back to the third millennium B.C. It’s an interesting tactic, and it leads the writer to a less Utopian take on the Web-as-library than some digitization advocates have posited:
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2525
Posted by schnitzr at November 16, 2007 08:21 AM