Wikipedia and libraries

What's the most important thing about the web?
Instant access, free access, or permanent access?

At MaisonBisson, Casey Bisson suggests integrating Wikipedia's entries with the display of catalog search results, with the obvious example of biographical data: "We have three books about Nikola Tesla, but why not include the first few paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry on him?"

He connects this effort (at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, apparently) with the "increasing tendency toward self-service" and he says this about Wikipedia:

For my part, I've come to love Wikipedia, despite having access to EB and other, more traditional sources. Why? Because it takes better advantage of the web than others, and unlike those commercial products, I don't have to sign in to use it.

At PressThink, a few months back I read an essay by Simon Waldman, the director of digital publishing at The Guardian newspaper. He discusses how so many people think of immediacy as being the point of the web and yet that the key element for participating in the conversation of the web is permanence. He says that many newspapers, despite being on the web, are not of the web because after a week or so they remove their articles from free access. And with this you slip off the search engines and out of the consciousness of the web user.

In our instant access world, you think, OK, I put my article on the web. But you have to leave it there, you have to make it accessible for perennial discovery. But if you look up subjects of interest in a hundred fields, you'll note the absence of The New York Times and the Washington Post and other authorities, who remove their stories from the freely accessible web and so remove themselves from the full impact they can have in Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.

It is the same with all information. Keep the indexes, keep the content, keep the images protected under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible there. They will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

And this goes for libraries too, especially when I owe no more allegiance to my local library than I do to my local newspaper. After all any accessible library may be closer in cyberspace than my local library or newspaper.

(Thanks to TeleRead for the pointer.)