My wife and I just decided that we would rather live without heat than air conditioning. We decided this after living for four days without it, during the hottest week of the year in Raleigh. A mixture of bad luck and some repairman incompetence made for a very long weekend.

I remember when I first started at NC State, I jokingly asked one of the older staff why everyone in N.C. walked so slow. She replied—quite wisely—that you can separate North Carolinians into two camps: those who lived here before air conditioning and those who moved here after it became pervasive. "If you had moved that fast back then, you would have been dead by 3 p.m.," she quipped. "Of course, you would have been wearing a jacket and tie, too," she added with a wink and a sideways glance at my attire.

All that heat made people slow down. I wonder if that is what is happening to libraries. There's so much going on that we are actually slowing down in hopes of surviving the heat. Google books, RDA, ILS industry shake-ups, new catalogs, 2.0. I think I'll just grab a seat on that bench over there in the shade.

I think we need to change our state of mind a little. Instead of thinking of folks like Google making it too hot, think of them as air conditioning. We don't need them to survive, but they make things more comfortable. They change the pace of life.

Google won't say, but the Economist estimates that it could be scanning 10M books per year. Numbers I heard from the Library of Congress a couple of weeks ago reported 350,000 items cataloged last year. I'll let y'all do some comparative math on that one.

Open Library launched a little while ago. Brewster Kahle's crew wants to digitize and describe all the books. They're snarfing up as many catalog records as they can. This is an interesting cooperative project that is essentially challenging both OCLC and Google. Is this a problem for libraries or an opportunity? Should we be preparing to ship all pre-1923 titles off to remote storage and compact shelving so that we can figure out what to do with the rest of the collections?

Amazon and Kirtas have teamed up with Emory and the University of Maine to cool things off as well. Get ready for more print on demand. Is this an area that libraries would want to wade into on their own? Now, if we can only travel the last hot mile of the e-book journey by convincing publishers that e-books are air conditioning, not more heat (we also need to convince them to make more public roads and less private and exclusive tollways).

When I related the story of my weekend and the sentiment about living without A/C to a complete stranger yesterday, he replied, "Funny thing is you need heat to survive, not air conditioning." We like heat, we need heat, but for now, I'm pretty happy with all the air conditioning.

What do you get when the 800-pound gorilla mates with the elephant in the room? Well, it looks as though you might just get the OCLC division of Google, Inc. The Mountain View, California, search giant has announced that it will acquire 100% of OCLC, the library cooperative based in Dublin, Ohio. The news was reported today on the ALA TechSource blog.

The news should come as a shock to the library community, which has waffled for several years between loathing their supposed competition and acquiescing to Google's leading position in the search market. On the other hand, libraries should be rejoicing at the implied value that Google has placed on the fruits of library labor.

Details of the deal are sketchy, and an official press release has not been issued. The real surprise would have to be the compliance of OCLC's Board of Trustees in making such a deal. While I could not reach any of them on a weekend, I was able to reach a few friends and colleagues in Ohio.

Ralph LeVan, senior research scientist for OCLC, expressed confidence that OCLC research staff would "rejuvenate the fledgling full-text division in Mountain View."

Jay Jordan could not be reached for comment from his reportedly remote location somewhere in the Caribbean, but Mike Teets, vice president for Global Product Architecture said, "The staff who will remain with the OCLC division are pretty excited about moving someplace with sunshine."

Chip Nilges, yet another V.P. at the library powerhouse, was more reflective, saying only, "I wonder what they're gonna do with this old mausoleum."

A source at Google who did not want to be identified said, "We're looking forward to finally having enough librarians on staff to catalog all those web pages." What does "tongue-in-cheek" sound like over the phone?

Frankly, I don't know what to make of all this. The combination of Google's full-text initiatives with OCLC's century's worth of metadata could make for some interesting products. Throw in the companies that OCLC has acquired over the last few years, and you could have the foundation for GoogleILS, GoogleResolver, GoogleERM, GoogleSelfcheck, or simply GoogleLibrary. Lipstick, wig, and heels on a pig.

"I suppose your father lost his job to a robot. I don't know, maybe you would have simply banned the internet to keep the libraries open."
—Bruce Greenwood to Will Smith in the movie I, Robot

The board has not gone public yet, but other well-known librarians are already starting to react. Susan Gibbons, associate dean at the University of Rochester Libraries, commented, "When you really stop to think about it, [the acquisition] was inevitable. Just imagine the improvements that Google will be able to make to its search algorithms by mining all of OCLC's holdings data."

Roy Tennant echoed Gibbons with some added impatience. "What took them so long?" he said when I reached him in California late last night. "How could any company that purports to 'provide access to the world's information' do it without libraries?" added Tennant. "Or at least, how could they do it without getting all our stuff?"

Rumors and predictions of Google's steady takeover have been around a while...I just thought it would take longer for them to go after libraries like this. One question I still have is "Where's our cut?" I was thinking about the billion-dollar stock deal that YouTube got and felt a little jealous. A fool and his money are soon parted, but lucky to get together in the first place. A fool and his senses may never even pass each other in the hallway.

I've always had a hard time explaining my position on e-books. Some of my esteemed colleagues are quick to point out the minor dent that e-books have made in overall book sales in this country and others. But when I started evangelizing about e-books back in the late 1990s, we were still talking about what I call the "curl-up factor." I grew so tired of hearing people complain about not wanting to curl up with an e-book, or the inability to take an e-book to the beach, that as soon as I read either phrase in e-book commentary, I simply stopped. [WARNING: rhetorical question ahead. No need to flood comments.] How many laptop owners can say they've never curled up with theirs in bed, and who hasn't seen a Blackberry at the beach?

The interesting thing to me is that much of the debate about whether to do e-books ended when Google made its now-famous announcement. "Whether or not" to digitize became "how, which, and whose books" nearly overnight. I still find it ironic that despite publishers and middleware providers' valiant efforts to digitize books, it took a press release about Google digitizing millions of books for which it had no rights to turn the tide of e-book production.

There are a couple of interesting new things out there. First, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is announcing a conference in New York City for May 9, 2007. Digital Book 2007 will feature digital publishing and mobile device innovations. Librarians might remember the IDPF as the OeBF, or Open eBook Forum. It dropped the old moniker when it became clear that the group was essentially a trade organization, and not primarily an effort to create an open e-book standard—a goal that I still believe was thwarted by the conflict of interest of some of its participants in maintaining the strong footing of proprietary technology in the e-books market space. Anyway, the conference will likely include a better look at e-ink technologies, Adobe's new Flash-based e-book reader, and more.

The conference's confirmed speaker list includes the Digital Library Federation's new executive director, Peter Brantley. Brantley recently shook up the e-book world a little with a Google e-book apologia related to recent library dealings with the Google Books project. The original post is a poetic read; its follow-up, "Reprise with Clarity," is also excellent.

Back to my position on e-books. It's not a "more digital books" position, but what I like to call "books more digital." That is, the more digital the book is, the more options publishers, libraries, patrons, and shoppers will have for consuming them and building services upon them. Whether e-ink, cell-phone, or print-on-demand paperback, a more digital book is a more readable book. Now that the "whether or not" debate is coming to an end, it may be time (or it may be too late) for libraries to reinvest their time in investigating standards, pressuring publishers to release content for digitization, and playing with the technology that will soon be (or already is) in the hands of our patrons.

After all this serious talk about the future of automation systems, I thought I would lighten the load with a little humor.

This was another take-away from my trip to Google that I did not mention in my more formal report. It's a picture from the restroom stall at Google. Now, I work at a state institution where we consider a toilet paper holder still attached to the wall quite a luxury. But this blows away (ahem) all the talk of free food, ping-pong, and jeans at work.

Like most Google user interfaces, the options are simple and intuitive, even if the results are somewhat shocking.

What does it say about us when the toilets of a search-engine giant are even more high-tech than some of libraries' search-and-retrieval technology?