Steve Coffman has written an articulate and provocative article on recent projects, fads and trends in the library field.
Plinius concurs. I’ve tried to study the fate of Norwegian digital library projects, and have come to similar conclusions. Like Coffman, I have also been engaged in several of these projects. Below I have cut-and-pasted some of his more incisive statements:
- The past 30 years of library history is littered with projects and plans and sometimes just dreams of ways the library might play a more pivotal role in the digital revolution …
- Some of those projects never really got off the ground.
Web Directories
There were lots of collaborative projects to develop “librarian-built” directories of web resources.
- The Librarians Index to the internet is a good example from the public library side, and the Infomine project at the University of California–Riverside is an example of many from the academic side.
- Many of these projects were grant-funded and died off when the money ran out.
- Some still linger — used mostly by librarians, as they have always been — as the rest of the world rushes right by our (sometimes) carefully tended websites and directories on the way to Google, Bing, and other search engines.







The rising tide of social media has reached the high castle of librarianship.
Today