Gutenberg 2.0: Harvard's libraries deal with disruptive change

The May-June 2010 issue of the Harvard alumni magazine has an article on libraries, digital libraries, information in the Web 2.0 environment, etc. Among its opening paragraphs is the following: “Who has the most scientific knowledge of largescale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Peter Bol, Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations. ….."A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”

For the full article, go to http://harvardmag.com/pdf/2010/05-pdfs/0510-36.pdf