OCLC’s Jay Jordan to “Save Libraries”

Here’s one from the Israeli website Haaretz.com about OCLC President Jay Jordan’s promise to save libraries from extinction.

The next stage in the OCLC plan is to establish an efficient mechanism for inter-library loans that will make it possible for one library to order books from another. In the long term, the unification of the stock and the catalogs of tens of thousands of libraries has far-reaching implications: It will create a global supra-library in which each of the participating libraries is just a terminal or a branch. The library is in effect losing its autonomy; it is becoming another tool in the information-consumer’s toolbox, a kind of analog hard disk from which it is possible to extract data as needed.