Long live Google, but don't count on it

An interesting take on "The Library in the Digital Age" appeared in June 12 issue of The New York Review of Books. The author, Robert Darnton, argues that rather than characterizing our own era as The Information Age, we should consider that "every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable." It is because of information's inherent instability - no matter the format - that the library, and in particular he is talking about the research library, must be sustained. "Long live Google," he says, "but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns."