Beware of the Keepers of the Word

"...and the word was good, and the word was
of God"...

How could I possibly be against access to the
world's knowledge? Of course, like most sane
people, I am not against it and, after more than
40 years of working in libraries, am rather for
it. I have spent a lot of my long professional
life working on aspects of the noble aim of
Universal Bibliographic Control—a mechanism by
which all the world's recorded knowledge would be
known, and available, to the people of the world.
My sin against bloggery is that I do not believe
this particular project will give us anything
that comes anywhere near access to the world's
knowledge.

Now, keeping in mind what you just read,
continue...

"It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning
again, knowing almost nothing. People were
talking about the end of physics. Relativity and
quantum mechanics looked as if they were going to
clean out the whole problem between them. A
theory of everything. But they only explained the
very big and the very small. The universe, the
elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff
which is our lives, the things people write
poetry about -clouds - daffodils -waterfalls -
... these things are full of mystery, as
mysterious to us as the heavens were to the
Greeks. Because the problem turns out to be
different. We can't even predict the next drop
from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each
drip sets up the conditions for the next, the
smallest variation blows prediction apart, and
the weather in unpredictable the same way, will
always be unpredictable. When you push the
numbers through the computer you can see it on
the screen. The future is disorder. A door like
this has cracked open five or six times since we
got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible
time to be alive, when almost everything you
thought you knew is wrong..........
Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard.

"For two thousand years people have believed
that the sun and all the stars of heaven rotate
around mankind. Pope, cardinals, princes,
professors, captains, merchants, fishwives and
schoolkids thought they were sitting motionless
inside this crystal sphere. But now we are
breaking out of it, Andrea, at full speed.... The
old idea was always that the stars were fixed to
a crystal vault to stop them falling down. Today
we have found the courage to let them soar
through space without support ... And the earth
is rolling cheerfully around the sun, and the
fishwives, merchants, princes, and cardinals, and
even the Pope are rolling with it ... The
universe has lost its centre overnight, and woken
up to find it has countless centres. So that each
one can now be seen as the centre, or none at
all." .......Life of Galileo, by Bertold
Brecht

How about these 13,000 books available for free
download, without even a library card in your pocket.

So much for all the world's good information being
found only in the library.

What of those around the world that have no access
to a library but have an internet connection?

Read.