GOOGLE IS NOT THE NET

摘要

If librarians find Google's ubiquitous presence a bit troubling, the company hardly played down those fears at the 2006 American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in New Orleans. Its gargantuan booth sat on prime real estate smack in the middle of the show floor. Inside the booth, the company premiered its "library movie," a short that rivaled I am Cuba in its earnest attempt to define the common fate of Google and libraries. In fact, so wary of Google are some librarians that at a boozy reception people joked that the blinking red buttons given away at the booth were in fact tiny scanners, part of a pilot program to suck up and transmit to Google anything within ten feet of an attached librarian.