Wayne Jones wrote:
> Fifty years from now, librarians and information professionals and even library users wonĄŻt be looking back on Martha Yee, Michael Gorman, and Thomas Mann and thanking them for saving the profession from being devoured by the AmaGoogle monster. Instead, their brand of reactionary hyperbole will be a curiosity in the history of a profession which will have decided to embrace the habits of its users and adjust accordingly, rather than denigrating keywords and other practical searching and promoting an old-fashioned and unrealistic attitude toward information and the people who organize and use it.
Well well, fifty years! You can argue like this about most anybody
saying whatever they say these days!
But predictions are always difficult, esp. about the future.
You are not saying, or are you, that the AmaGoogle monster will still be
at large, and much larger even, 50 years from now? Who had been able to
say it was lurking round the corner even in 1997? Who can say what's
lurking there now? What makes you sure it will be something better?
The difficulty, as always, is to find the grain of salt among the
overabundance of chaff, and prophets are seldom recognized and
acknowledged in their own time and day. So where is it?
Let me risk one prediction: It will take a considerable step
forward in artificial intelligence development to enable the current
monsters, or new ones, to do better and to integrate in new ways what's
being done today. What the contemporary monsters are doing is still not
a lot more than number crunching. That's artificial, but hardly
intelligent.
Libraries do contribute intelligence as an ingredient to their products,
non-artificial intelligence. Machinery to render it obsolete has
yet to be invented. If it comes, much more will be obliterated or
profoundly changed than libraries and catalogs. For now, this is mere
speculation.
Combine libraries, archives, and the Internet, and they comprise nothing
less but the accumulated intellectual and artistic recordings of
humankind, inasmuch as these survive, from all periods, all countries
and cultures, in all languages and scripts and about all subjects, by
all individuals who ever wished to make a contribution. The size and the
complexity of this is staggering. It is naive to expect that navigating
this multidimensional universe might be easy or might be made a simple
matter.
No one single method can serve all purposes and all searchers all the
time - everybody will know this who has tried to find anything on more
than one occasion. Libraries have to provide simple interfaces for
simple questions, they also have to invite readers to try more
sophisticated methods and ways that are more taxing for their native
intelligence instead of trying to tell them they can leave it at
home.
B.Eversberg
Received on Wed Aug 01 2007 - 01:45:29 EDT