The Decline and Fall of the Library Empire

Steve Coffman:

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 that continues to transform the information landscape around us. Some of those projects never really got off the ground.

Web Directories

Remember those heady early days when we thought we were going to catalog the web? OCLC even set up a whole project for this task back around the turn of the century (sounds like a long time ago, doesn't it?). It was called CORC, or Collaborative Online Resource Catalog. Librarians around the world were supposed to select and catalog "good, librarian-certified" web resources. There was even talk of assigning Dewey numbers to websites -- an idea which I'm sure would have brought tears to the eyes of many, especially our patrons. Today, the only evidence you can find of CORC is a few sentences in a list of abandoned research projects on the OCLC website and some links to PowerPoints and articles saluting it -- most now more than 10 years old.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 5, 2012 1:16 AM
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