I’m sure that title has been repeated many many times today. Today Google unveiled Google Base, a simple web database that allows you to include rich metadata for items. Google will then index and allow others to search the information.
How does this affect libraries? Take a look at one of the example schemas: “Reference Articles”. Imagine an army of millions of people inputting book and article metadata. They’re cataloging. Which is what this is doing, it’s replacing the cataloger. But, how can we trust the information that is put in? Well, it’s simple economics. Trustworthy sources of metadata will rise to the top. In addition, millions of people will be looking at the data, so errors will be fixed fast. Take a look at freedb for an example of trustworthy user-submitted metadata.
