Role of librarians

[Elisabeth Roche]

I heard a congressional hearing yesterday, testimony for the Science and
Technology Committee.

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. 

He made the point that it would make little difference if the information
was on the Internet and our country spent dollars to allow access to the
Internet to our children in schools or homes.  He said that the information
is already in libraries, and our school system teaches the students how to
use libraries, and they still aren't used by students.

He contended that the same would be true for the Internet, just because we
set up a new system with new
access routes to information, the result would be the same, only a small
minority of the population would bother
using it for information. The libraries, which have all the information in
them already, are more than underused.

What does everyone think of this?

Elisabeth Roche ace at opus1.com