I enjoyed the essays in this exercise. John Riemer's essay about improving library services resonated particularly well with my thinking. Ever since my first digital library course, I've thought the essential problem facing libraries as we go digital is that of findability. Too much good stuff, and too few good tools to find it! That's still the case, on so many different scales.
LexisNexis Academic, a single database, contains a multitude of data sets and search interfaces. Then scale up by adding the other 271 databases to which NSU subscribes, each with their own interfaces and modules, and you are another order of magnitude lost. Then scale up again to include OCLC, the Library of Congress, digital archives around the world, and (finally) the open web, and we see how far away we are from having a good way of finding information in this digital world.
Sadly, there's no magic 2.0 button to push that will make all this information available and organized. Google, Inc.'s corporate mission is to do this: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". As long as the advertising stream stays strong they may just pull it off!
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"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
Ha! I had no idea that was part of Google's mission.
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