Anonymous Patron writes “Libraries begin uncertain new chapter: With internet companies such as Google becoming more involved in digitising content, what role does the public library have in today’s web-driven society?”
When John Dolan, the new libraries champion for England, began trying to drag the library service into the digital age, the dictionary of internet terms was a very different book. “Blogs” hadn’t been invented, “geek” was still a term of abuse, and as for “Google”, it had been in business for just two months. That was July 1998. Dolan, then head of Birmingham libraries, was project leader of the People’s Network report – which, on its publication that month, heralded an idea that seemed ambitious in the extreme: free public internet access in every library, and ICT training for all library staff.
Wanna guess how it ends?
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