This is an interesting topic. While the world has clearly benefitted from an explosion of information systems, I do think about what we may have lost when libra

This is an interesting topic. While the world has clearly benefitted from an explosion of information systems, I do think about what we may have lost when libraries essentially lost their role as guardians and custodians of information systems. I have a friend whose kid discovered a red envelope with money in the pages of a library book. They took it to back to the library and mentioned this, figuring that the librarian could look up the history of who had checked out this book, to return the money. Nope. They absolutely deliberately do not keep that information. The idea is that if you can't decide what to read privately, then you aren't truly free to decide what to read. Contrast this with the steps you have to take to remove something from your viewing history on netflix (last I checked, you can't, but you can "bury" it by selecting a bunch of shows that you don't watch). Or various "experiments" run on users of different social networking sites. Innovation in the web sphere has been tremendous, I'm not going to deny that. But we did lose something valuable when the tsunami of the internet knocked librarians out of their role as guardians of information.