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Eric Lease Morgan wrote: > This, taken to a its logical conclusion, seems to say that libraries > are about providing access to information to the people who can't get > access any other way. This group of people will be getting smaller and > smaller. I imagine a time when the entire content of a library can be > stored on a thing the size and shape of a sugar cube. To read the > content of the cube you will drop it into a device, and the device will > facilitate access. As the amount of content on cube increases the less > important access will be come and the more important services against > the content will become. This, in my opinion, is an opportunity for > librarianship. It is where librarianship can grow and fill a niche. I recall seeing some documentary where a physicist argued that you could fit the entire content of the Encyclopedia Britannica (text only, no formatting or pictures) on to an area equal to the head of a pin, but that would be about the theoretical maximum storage density possible, and you would need a powerful electron microscope to read it. If that is true, I think that means you could fit the text equivalent of 10,000 Britannicas on an area roughly the size of a compact disc. Of course, by storing data in layers in a three dimensional container, you could get even more but, as impressive as that kind of storage density is, it seems doubtful that we could store the entire content of a large modern library on such a small device, never mind all of the material that a future library might have. Not only can we expect libraries to have more text, images, and sound in the future, but also exotic storage-gobbling stuff like ultra-high definition three-dimensional video, digital images with microscopic levels of detail, a set of 1:1 scale maps of Earth, and other things that I am sure no one will be able to live without once they are possible. At any rate, history has shown that we have the impressive ability to come up with new storage needs just as quickly as new storage technology can be developed. Despite higher and higher storage densities, it certainly seems that the physical space devoted to digital data storage is going up, not down. I have every confidence that we will continue to rely on buildings rather than pockets for our primary data storage needs. I think that libraries have always been about access services and not just storage. In order to access something, you have to have it in the first place, but that isn't enough. Libraries are valuable not just because they contain information but because the information is selected, cataloged, and sorted. A big pile containing every book ever published isn't nearly as useful as a few thousand items, selected for relevance, cataloged, classified according to some relevant theme, and serviced by people and/or systems with the ability to identify and retrieve the most relevant materials for a particular need. We already have an example of what an enormous repository of information with no selection policy, no central management, and only primitive mediated access looks like, and it seems to underscore the enormous value of organization and mediation. -- William Wueppelmann http://www.canadiana.org/ ** NEW EMAIL ADDRESS: [log in to unmask] ** ** Please update your address book. **