Note: Archie has already been used since ArpaNet, and webcrawlers were in their early stages. So this article might be in itself a paleofuture item. Anyway, Clarke's vision is interesting enough to cite both him and Bawden.
Clarke:
At least there was a sporting chance that what he was looking for was hidden somewhere in the immense body of existing scientific knowledge. Slowly and carefully, [he] set up an automatic search programme, designed for what it would exclude as much as what it would embrace. It should cut out all Earth-related references — they would certainly number in the millions — and concentrate entirely on extraterrestrial citations.
...Intelligence was frequently wrong, and even more often confused by the avalanche of raw facts it had to evaluate... when you did not know what you were looking for, something that at first sight seemed irrelevant, or even nonsensical, might turn out to be a vital clue.
Bawden:
The prospect of having essentially all information available in digital form, rapidly accessibly from the desktop by a consistent interface, may seem an information worker's dream. In fact, it will rapidly turn into a nightmare, if systems and procedures are not quickly developed for filtering, prioritising, discarding and forgetting information, as well as for extracting nuggets from the pile: data mining, visualisation, etc. Philosophically, this may go against many of the 'traditional' values of the library/information professions, which have tended to emphasise acquiring, preserving and accessing 'all relevant material'.Did Google help us to prevent Bawden's concerns? All required functionality is in place, although controlled by Google...
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