What's a library to do?

Libraries are places where collections of written materials are preserved and arranged for specific on demand use. Private individuals maintain and use their own libraries, but for most of human history only the very wealthy or intellectually elite could afford this privilege. Libraries have always gone along with educational and research institutions as well as the most powerful commercial, legal and political establishments.

When written materials were all produced by hand they were very rare indeed. Gathering what little there was of such materials in central repositories in the care of experts in their preservation and retrieval made sense in terms of maximizing their social utility. The concentration of informational resources in close association with concentrations of political and economic power fit right in with the hierarchical ordering of society as a whole.

Then the mass (re)production of written words through printing made them available on a scale undreamed of in earlier times. Similar technological innovations made other material goods more widely available as well and improved the opportunities for quality of life and quantity of leisure for intellectual self improvement for many more private individuals than previously. Books, magazines and newspapers were still physical objects, however, and their production and distribution were subject to limitations imposed by physics and economics. The procurement, housing and care of anything more than a modest collection of written materials was still well beyond the means of the vast majority of individuals. The demand for a more informed workforce and citizenry by more democratic economic and political institutions led to the creation of public libraries professionally staffed.

Written words are now represented in electromagnetic form. Once the words of a book or a journal article have been reduced to this form, they can be redisplayed on the screen of any computer monitor connected to the world wide web of electronic data communications technology infrastructure. Written words in this electronic form do not have to be collected in a common repository to be made accessible, but a collection of addresses of internet connected locations from which they can be accessed is necessary for access to be responsive to need, and the accuracy of the addresses and the integrity of the representations must be established and maintained.

RollYo and LibraryThing are the beginnings of a do it yourself response to the need to reorganize our approach to the newly mediated written word. RollYo collects trusted collectors of directions to online word sources in order to give reliable directions to resources in response to specific keyword queries. LibraryThing collects descriptions of collectors collections and determines their interconnections in order to facilitate communication between collectors about their collections based on mutual interests. I'm not sure what roll traditional hard copy based libraries have to play in these processes other than providing good examples of selection and organization and also making sure that representations of the materials that are unique to their own collections are made electronically available.