"The Cloud" - Will it free us?

This is what I have been fretting over for quite some time now - the death of content ownership.  I will reiterate this:  I love technology and gadgetry.  I do.  I get "gadget-envy" every time I see someone walking about using the latest [fill in the blank].  But like the author of that article, I am unconvinced that a subscription service is the best model for the intellectual accumulation of our race.  Perhaps you think that is a bit overwrought.  Maybe it is.  True, I am becoming more of a curmudgeon.

A counter to this twist in intellectual property control is presented in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Thank you Sandra for the link to this editorial piece by Harvard professor and librarian Robert Darnton.  This is a much better presentation of the idea I talk about a lot with patrons:  That the proliferation of formats and "forms of communication" simply divides a library's resources and makes the librarian's job more difficult but it doesn't mean that libraries are outmoded.  In fact, Professor Darnton is surely correct in saying that:

Librarians are responding to the needs of their patrons in many new ways, notably by guiding them through the wilderness of cyberspace to relevant and reliable digital material. Libraries never were warehouses of books. While continuing to provide books in the future, they will function as nerve centers for communicating digitized information at the neighborhood level as well as on college campuses.

 Perhaps I'll relax a bit about content ownership and worry more about how we (library workers) will keep up.  It is our job, after all, to help people navigate the vastness of the information universe now available to anyone at the local public library.