Last time I went to the public library, a part of me was struck by how irrelevant the place has come to seem to me: too limited a space stacked with thousands of books and no quick solution for finding what you are looking for. The Dewey Decimal Systems is a bit sluggish in these Google-driven days, in other words.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love libraries, but everything shifted a few years ago. We went too quickly from the time when research online was discouraged at schools to the time when it is at the core of our daily activities — casual, educational or scientific.
This week Google announced “an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as Popular Mechanics, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vegetarian Times, Baseball Digest and American Cowboy. It has also digitized the entire content of more than seven million published books; amazingly, the text is entirely searchable. Check it out on Google Book Search.
Last month, Google also included a “collection of newly-digitized images produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.” View them at Google Image Search.
Another effort, which you may be already familiar with, is Google’s historical newspapers that can be found on Google News archive.
I still love the quiet sanctuaries of free-for-all knowledge, but I’d like to see a new kind of library that would not be just a place that offers Internet access for free, but make itself a physical extension of Googles and wikipedias as well.