Role of librarians

[Nick Arnett]

>> Alan Kay of Apple Computer had some astonishing and interesting opinions. I
>> felt these comments were given as his personal opinion and don't know how
>> much weight to give them. Maybe someone can help me out with this.
>>
>> He said that all the information of our civilized Western world was in the
>> libraries, and in 4 years all the information would still be in the
>> libraries. He said it would not be on the Internet.

This rings a bell -- Alan and I, at the first Roundtable in Multimedia
(1990), debated this very issue.  He seemed to suggest that it would be
very easy to put libraries on-line:

"Do the arithmetic for the Santa Monica Public Library... Thirty of
Toshiba's PC-based optical character recognition products, which parse the
page and can recognize fine text and identify columns, could put the entire
Santa Monica Library on-line in less than a year and a half."

My argument that was even if you did that, it would't be useful without a
great deal more work to organize the digitized information so that it would
be useful; Alan argued that the only obstacle was the lack of a willingness
to spend money to digitize the books.

I think a lot of Alan, but this was one time that I found myself completely
on the other side.

Nick