jon richfield said:

Well, the librarians were by no means the only ones.

<sigh> of course you're right.

From the mid-twentieth century on, the major advances in computing were missed. misread, mis-evaluated, mis-accommodated, and mis-exploited.

ain't that the truth...

most applications to major IT and comms advances are analogous to using the internal combustion engine to brandish the buggy whip.

yep...

The social dynamics of innovation are fascinating in their wasteful teleological inadequacy, and in their paradoxical Darwinian effectiveness, which rapidly is dissipated in the triviality of their application.

so many places in society, we've missed the big picture... and meanwhile, the google boys made billions and billions off a simple _search_ system. and zuckerberg is laughing his way to the youngest billionaire bank for "reinventing" the college yearbook... meanwhile, our world falls apart... it's a shame. but that's precisely why i take special aim at the librarians... of _all_ the professions, it was the one that was uniquely qualified to see the magic of "unlimited distribution", and uniquely charged with getting information out to the public. they should have been the superheroes that saved the masses from our own shortsighted perspectives. they really should've. but time after time, and time again, they failed in their mission. they should have taken the lead on digitizing our cultural assets. but they were nowhere to be seen, absolutely nowhere to be seen. and they said nothing. everything was as quiet as... well, a library. heck, they couldn't even digitize their own _card_catalogs_ correctly. they gave millions and millions -- literally millions and millions -- of dollars to outside vendors, and didn't even have the intelligence to write performance guarantees into the contracts, so when those vendors turned over systems that didn't work, we were out of luck... and when i say those systems "didn't work", i don't mean that they didn't give optimal results, or even good results. _they_didn't_run._ and the timid, mousy librarians replied with an "oh, that's too bad." and then, after many more millions, when they finally got systems that _did_ run, they were so overjoyed that they forget to examine whether these systems gave good results, let alone _optimal_ ones. it ends up that those systems were crap, and the users knew it, but the librarians were so frustrated with their failure up to that point they tried to paper over the problems and get users to ignore them. meanwhile, those same users _were_ getting results they could use at home, on their personal computers, from google. idiot librarians. -bowerbird