The biggest threat to world libraries since Caesar's troops landed in Alexandria? Or the greatest boon to information handling ever invented? The web is probably both, simultaneously. That would also seem to be a conclusion drawn from this excellent set of essays. Of course, quite apart from technical, commercial and similar issues, there is the problem of the attitude of students to the web. It seems to me that information literacy teaching today centres on refuting two universally held assumptions: it is all on the web; and Google will find it for me. And not just students either: those assumptions are held very widely across the population and must themselves pose one of the major threats to information availability in a free and democratic society; a particular threat since they are not overt problems, especially when people conduct a search and think they have found all the information they need on a subject, but without necessarily recognising the relative authenticity of the information or of its source.
Four papers in Part 1 of this collection look at the “problem”: what forces shape the content of and access to the web, and how they do it. Jill Walker, of the University of Bergen, “presents search engines as commercial entities that reinforce the most powerfully funded information”. The next two papers then examine the consequences for student research: these are important findings, being based on analysis of what students actually do and what are the results of their searching. The final paper in this section, by Julie Frechette of Worcester State College, argues that web filtering devices act as second‐tier agents to search engines in “… suppressing certain kinds of “illicit” content while surreptitiously promoting commercial interests and commercial content”. The conclusion of this Part is that search engines are by no means neutral and that a model designed to promote access to commercial information is not appropriate to searching the richness and variety of all the other information available on the web.
Part 2 comprises six papers describing various international projects to offer alternative ways of accessing online content. These offer various technical means of approaching and dealing with these issues, with special reference to open access initiatives. Metadata harvesting is at the core of this, so late in my career I find classification and cataloguing at last demonstrating even more relevance than they have in the past: something many of us have always known, and often enough said, but gratifying to see confirmed in a new age. After the doom and gloom of the problems, the various solutions put forward in this section are especially positive and so very welcome.
A brave new world indeed, both in Huxley's original terms and in our interpretation of the future. The Library strikes back? There are several Luke Sky‐walkers here, and perhaps it is not so far‐fetched to see the commercial world as the evil empire; the identity of Darth Vader is best left to the imagination. Library Trends always seems to gather an appropriate collection of papers on whatever issue it is addressing, and this is no exception. The problems and threats are clearly examined and explained; some solutions are equally clearly presented. This is an important and ultimately heartening collection on one of the key issues of our time.
