I gave a talk yesterday to a library association and managed to make it all the way into the Q&A session before uttering the word “doomed.” We ended up talking about whether there can be librarians without books.

The very first model proposed by the audience was: “We’re the gatekeepers of knowledge.” This role will only become more important as the amount of bad information on the Internet grows. Supposedly.

But there are two forces working against the gatekeeper idea. First, we seem to be self-organizing our own gatekeepers. Sometimes they’re collaborative and sometimes our new gatekeepers emerge from the noise in unpredictable ways. There will certainly still be top-down gatekeepers in the traditional sense, but they are at least becoming less important because there are so many other gates.

Second, when there’s true abundance, gatekeeping actually drives down the value of what’s being protected: if there’s manna everywhere, putting a gatekeeper in front of a storeroom just means that that no one’s going to bother with the protected manna. Similarly, if I can find out everything I need about Ghana easily by surfing, I’m not going to pay the Britannica a fee to get the same information.

But, reply the librarians, you may not get the best information for free on the Web. No, but I don’t need the best information. I just need good enough information. And where I do need information certified as the best, I will be willing to pay for it. But the most important change in all this is indeed a movement away from thinking that there routinely is such a thing as “the best” information that’s kept in guarded, temperature-controlled cellars. For better or worse, in an economy of abundance, good enough is good enough.

Categories: Uncategorized dw