Role of librarians

[Elizabeth Padilla]

David Ritchie writes,

>>> Remember we already agreed that the real content of the >>internet is 
>>> people.

>>I didn't agree on this... nope... not a bit.

>>And neither did I.  Nor did, I suspect, a lot of other folks.

People, organizations, sentient beings, the mall...all the same thing.

We are all thinking rather textually about resources aren't we?
What happens when I put on my VR visor?
My VR agent will greet me and we'll have an exchange (session).
It will know who I am, and will ask me what I want, and I'll tell it
(Dr. N's paper on data dictionaries or Sekyar Jaya's recording of
Kecak Dance). It may ask me for more specifics if it needs to.
Then it will go off - to pre-profiled (set by me/and commercial
info providers) locations and have a dialog with some other agent(s).
I won't know, nor need to know how, but my agent should easily be
able to give me details in English if I ask, on where it found
something, and may prompt me that something new and related exists.
If I want a person/source, I'll get it. If I want a text file or
application that will be taken care of (and charged to my account).
I don't think we'll be rummaging through each others directories
any more, nor be nailed down to a cite location/path/url.
All we'll need is a name.  You define where you are.
Intelligent agents can find you (or any organization) by your (orgs) name.
It'll be up to my the agent to know my interests, in order to weed out
unrelevant hits.

Just the name like MESH 1996. That should be easy for my agent to find.
The future always sounds so much easier - perhaps because by then
we'll have finished all the hard work needed to get there.

I think there are two issues going on in this discussion of roles:
one is how do I find x, the second is how do I provide access to my x.
Archives, directory structures, formats, file migrations, versions
are organization issues.
Intelligent browsers, intelligent information agents, client/server
protocols are interface, human factors, and artificial
intelligence issues.
These are two different problems, that should meet in the middle.
Fortunately, I believe,  they are to problems that we can still
participate in resolving.

Thom may be looking at it from a user's point of view, and many of us
are looking at it from a file management point of view. I know I am,
and it's not a pretty site (nor cite). :)

-Liz