Icebergs ahead

The article that made the most impact on me was Rick Anderson's "Away from the icebergs". In fact, it sort of freaked me out. I can't help thinking that sooner or later there will just be too much and the web... the google internet machine.... something... will just crash. And I know thats crazy but it still seems like its eventually going to happen. Rick Anderson says this specifically "Crazy as this may sound, the time has come for us to look skeptically at the very idea of a library “collection.” He says that his library has had a 55% decrease in circulation over the past 12 years and that everybody expects everything to be available online now. He says that it "no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get."

It drives me crazy now that when the computers go down for a day we tell stories about somebody actually 'using a book' to find the answer to a reference question as if its an urban legend or something. But that is apparently what things are coming to. Rick Anderson also says that we can no longer expect customers to come to us - we must come to them - whether virtually or otherwise. Ugh. I hate the idea of this. And its not that I want to go back to a time when we had to actually pull multiple reference books just to find a specific poem for a customer - but the satisfaction was definitely much much sweeter then just typing a line into google and having the answer pop up immediately. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm wistful for the past way of doing things and wary of the future (but hopeful as well) when it comes to libraries.