i-sako.com

I remember a conversation I had once many years ago, when I was a young journalism student, with a friend of mine who worked part-time for a local ISP. I was telling him about all the amazing things I was learning in one of my information-gathering courses, a lot of which focused on how to make profitable use of library resources. He remarked casually that libraries would one day cease to exist, because any and all valuable information would eventually find its way onto the Internet. Although I didn’t doubt even then that such a thing might happen one day, I was taken aback by the confident assertion that followed: “Heck, almost everything worthwhile already is.”

I was reminded of that conversation when I came across this article at CNN:

Use with caution: The perils of Wikipedia

In particular, this part caught my attention:

[Former American Library Association president Michael Gorman] added that Google and Wikipedia were creating a generation of “intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet,” with no interest in exploring non-digital resources.

I know this is true simply by the attitudes of many of the people I know and work with. If they can’t find something with a few Google searches or a quick swing by Wikipedia, it might as well not exist. It’s a shame, really, because even as remarkable as Google and Wikipedia are, they both barely amount to a drop in the bucket of human knowledge. To consider either of them anything more than the starting point for any significant information need would be foolish.

But what can be done about it? If everyone assumes that all the world’s knowledge is available in one place, how will they ever find out otherwise?