Of Fishermen

It would not be a surprise to anyone that the overwhelming majority of efforts to mine sources of information are being undertaken by for-profit start-ups (or projects heavily courted by those major, moneyed players.) But once companies grow to a certain size, do they become so complacent with their strategy and their market-share that they're hesitant to keep moving forward? The New York Times has an article today that touches in part on what some perceive to be Google's dilemma, between the comfort its users have with its current search structure, and evolving into a "deeper" search format.

There are plenty of issues to consider here, but I'd like to use this as an opportunity to compare Google to archives, if only because the realities of vastly accelerating technology have made Google appear, in some lights, a little old and stodgy, a little stuck in their ways. To say that archives face a similar problem would be to ignore the vast differences in resources between the average archival repository and a gigantic beast like Google. We're set in our ways even though we don't enjoy anything close to a comfy market-share. We're set in our ways because we don't have much of one. Does that mean we're stuck in the past, as everyone has been predicting?

And so what happens? What do we do? Adopt a for-profit model? I had a dream about that once -- behind the desk in the reading room a small team of workers in matching polo shirts -- customer service specialists--negotiated between client and database. I doubt that would ever happen, of course; staffing reading rooms even with part-time paraprofessionals doesn't seem the most cost-effective model, when everything can be dumped online. More likely that polo-shirted team will be making sure the automatic page-shuffling-scanner behaves, or working piecemeal to edit OCR'd documents or tables of metadata.

I suppose my point is, are companies' reluctance to lose their stranglehold on the market a possible thorn in their side, and if so, is it one that organizations not motivated by profit can exploit? How else can we possibly compete against the giants with the means to seize and negotiate great numbers of great vats of information, without any real responsibility to the people to whom it belongs? The fact that these are corporations whose goals are short-sighted should work in some way for us, because only long-standing organizations with longer-term investments can effectively and honestly represent themselves as able custodians of information. Archives and libraries seem especially well-posed to adopt this role. We have a proven track record and a proven interest in preserving information and providing access. But we have to work together, of course. Seriously. And with the joint and ultimate goal of preserving the stuff of democracy for the future. Concentrating solely on the present is to stay still and be completely pounded by the enormous waves of the Googles of the world.