Yes, yes, YES! After the pleasant surprise of Google Scholar, Google lays another one on us, and it’s a doozy: Google will be working together with Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and Oxford University to start scanning parts of their library collections and making them available online.

The thought of having easy access to obscure scholarly papers, rare books and fragile documents that it would otherwise be difficult to get a hold of is, in a word, thrilling. The Web has already done so much to provide people with daily access to information that they otherwise would never have had - and now I feel like we’re really on the brink of something even bigger, some tremendous explosion of knowledge, a new era of scholarship, perhaps, where all you need in order to tap the great stores of learning scattered all over the globe is a computer with an Internet connection.

Maybe I’m getting carried away, maybe I really have been too wrapped up in Quicksilver and the spirit of discovery that reigned in the 17th century. Whatever the cause, my heart actually started to beat faster as I read the article about Google’s new undertaking. I like to think that when the librarians say "The world is about to change", they’re not just talking about their changing role as preservers of the world’s knowledge, they’re talking about us as well, the people out in the world who will be reaping the benefits of the librarians’ work.

Maybe the library of the future will look like this.

P.S. There’s a longer, better article at the New York Times here - login: wrreaders