A fellow named Michael Rosenblum, whom I have never encountered before, has written a Huffington Post essay on libraries and meanders about on the idea that Google has made them obsolete. Mind you, this is not a direct point — indeed his inability to make a direct point or formulate a cohesive argument is abundant proof of his statement that:

Even though I lived right across the street from it [the Donnell Library in New York] for many years, I never went inside. I never sat in its reading room. I never checked out a book. I never explored its stacks to go through old volumes of bound periodicals in some research project.

Rosenblum is, as you will note from the screen capture, a TV guy and perhaps he can be forgiven for his preference for the Internet and indifference toward libraries. The information available on the Web can be illuminating or just a bunch of claptrap the cat dragged in. Not necessarily up to snuff for the conscientious researcher, but perfectly adequate for what I will politely call the less rigorous standards of television.

But in trying to distill Rosenblum’s thoughts, it seems that he doesn’t like libraries as he remembers them from his long-ago college days — nor does he like what they are becoming.

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