Arnold on Disintermediation in New Italian Compendium
December 8, 2008
December 2008 is shaping up as a busy book month. I received on December 6, 2008, my copy of “Galassia Web: La Cultura nella Rete”, published by Civita Associazione with the support of Boeing. I contributed a chapter that begins on page 67 and ending on page 80. My contribution was “Giochi di Open Access e altre nuove tecnologie di communicazione: la tentazione disintermediazion”. If your Italian is a bit rusty, the approximate English translation is “The Interplay of Open Access and Other New Technologies.”
The main point of my contribution hinges on Disintermediation. Institutions such as museums and libraries want to provide an online catalog and some type of access to the information under their stewardship. But large companies such as Google are slowly aggregating a broad range of content. For now, commercial enterprises have not shown a desire to create an aggregated service that includes indexes, images, music, and other information public institutions have created. The risk is that unless groups of institutions take the lead in aggregation, the commercial service may by default become the library or the museum for Internet users. In short, the disintermediation that ravaged commercial online services and corporate libraries may now have an impact on the information now in the control of universities, public agencies, privately-endowed institutions, and governmental entities. I don’t have a timeline but I make the point that acting in a parochial way may waste time. Action can provide a countermeasure for the forces of disintermediation.
I want to send a happy quack to the publisher, Moira Macpherson, and the editorial team that made this collection of essays a reality. So, here comes, “Quack!”
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2008
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