"A man, a plan, and a scanner" by Hafner

It is very interesting to me that the Google Book project involves a librarian and one at Harvard at that. In some way, I think that the project and the mission of the librarian can conflict, but come together in really interesting ways in others. In one way, my reaction to the librarian who is helping along the Google project is that they are actively outsourcing or downgrading their profession-instead of having to go to a library, they can just use Google. Seriously, does no one think that this has a very detrimental affect upon the profession? It scares me to think that people are actively reducing my future professional credibility. That’s really not an original argument, but it does bother me that Google is doing something that librarians have prided themselves on for a very long time, like providing information that is accurate and varied. On the other hand, it seems like librarians who encourage the Google book project are promoting the larger intellectual goals of disseminating information for all. Because the internet, it is true, is open all the time, and the library is not. The internet has information regardless of geographical location, and the library is sometimes dependent upon local holdings and so forth. So the overall ideology that librarians should get excited about and promote, are a large part of the Google project; intellectual freedom, access, and the idea that information is something to be shared and valued. Google book project is also something completely new in the history of the world, and so to want to crush that or negate that as librarians would, to understate, not be good.