The public library is not on the digital age's list of promises. When information migrates to the virtual world, the physical existence of shelves containing books is considered inefficient, even wasteful. In many countries libraries are being closed because of a lack of resources, and those that remain are losing their readers. In Israel, where the state is withdrawing from providing budgets for municipal and academic libraries, the problem is especially grave.

Jay Jordan is promising to save the libraries from extinction. However, to do so he is planning to completely change the way the library is constituted. For about two years now Jordan has been serving as the president of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). This used to be a domestic American organization, which was established in Ohio as an umbrella group for a number of regional libraries. In recent years the OCLC has become one of the most important forces in the library world, especially thanks to worldcat.org, the international online library catalog the organization has been operating for some 30 years now. Ostensibly, worldcat is just a search engine that resembles innumerable library catalogs the world over. However, as it expands it subsumes thousands of libraries into the information highway. It is already the largest library catalog in the world, uniting 57,000 libraries from 110 countries. It contains 86 million books, videos and audio titles. Jordan can therefore be defined as the chief librarian of the world.

Like many others, Jordan believes that in their current situation, libraries are in a state of crisis. However, he believes that at least part of the blame rests with the libraries themselves. "Libraries contain a very important treasure for humanity, but it is impossible to reach it," he said during a visit to Israel last week. "The libraries in the United States are relatively rich, but we, too, are in a state of crisis. The public needs to decide where the budget will go to: more police, more security or more books, and it doesn't always choose books. Our challenge is to show that the library has value in our day as well."

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In 2003 the OCLC signed an agreement with Google that provides the search engine access to the information in worldcat. At universities and colleges that are hooked up to the service, one can look for books and articles via Google Scholar and receive a referral to the desired book or article. "We conducted a study several years ago and found that 86 percent of the people searching for information do so with the help of a search engine and only 1 percent with the help of a library catalog," explains Jordan. "Therefore we made an agreement with Google, which provides them access to the information in worldcat. We are still in the first stage of allowing people to find out that the books exist. It remains more complicated to get to the book itself. That's what we're working on now."

Jordan visited Israel as a guest of the Information 2007 Conference, organized by the Teldan company. Seventy-one Israeli institutions are already cooperating with the OCLC and last month an agreement was also signed with the National Library in Jerusalem. "We will upload 600,000 books in Hebrew and 50,000 books in Arabic into our catalog," says Jordan. "This will make a tremendous resource accessible. Society needs to be aware of the value of this global cooperation."

In Jordan's opinion, initiatives like Google Books, which is now offering more than a million scanned books for limited use, are not expected to make the library superfluous in the near future. "Google are our partners and they are doing wonderful work. If they continue digitization at this pace, it will create a very large reservoir. People are saying that if Google is uploading all the books onto the Web, there is no longer a need for libraries. I don't believe that. They are working today with only 15 libraries. Though these are very large libraries, even if they scan all the books in them, they will have only 30 to 40 percent of the printed material."

The next stage in the OCLC plan is to establish an efficient mechanism for inter-library loans that will make it possible for one library to order books from another. In the long term, the unification of the stock and the catalogs of tens of thousands of libraries has far-reaching implications: It will create a global supra-library in which each of the participating libraries is just a terminal or a branch. The library is in effect losing its autonomy; it is becoming another tool in the information-consumer's toolbox, a kind of analog hard disk from which it is possible to extract data as needed.

However, it is precisely in a peripheral country like Israel that an arrangement like this is problematic: On the one hand, an Israeli reader who discovers that a certain book is in a library in Massachusetts or in Oslo can only dream of obtaining it. On the other hand, the suspicion arises that local libraries will relinquish the acquisition of books that are not popular, knowing that they exist in larger collections and are ostensibly accessible.

Jordan does not deny that the centralization of catalogs is above all a means of saving storage space and reducing costs in public and academic libraries.

"When you talk about the cuts in library budgets, you have to ask how they are using the budgets they have. Today libraries are not managed well enough. Their control of information is very partial. If there is a book that is read once in several decades, I believe it can be moved into storage, to a place that costs less money, and not remain in the main collection. If there is successful cooperation among libraries, this means that when one library doesn't have a certain book a reader wants, it will be able to request it from another library."

Unlike search engines or cellular content-providers, which are basically oriented toward the consumer, librarians are not mere agents who market information in accordance with demand. They are the guardians of the human cultural heritage, the persons responsible for the community's information. hey ensure that the coming generations will be able to enjoy the cultural treasures of the past, even those that interest hardly anyone in the present. "The librarian is the one who defends the books against the human race," is how Umberto Eco put it.

In Jordan's opinion, this attitude has to change in order to ensure the future of libraries. "I think that the librarian has to be less the guardian of information and more the Jedi of information," he says. In his opinion the digital gospel has to begin with a change in the librarians' way of thinking.

"At present, the librarian is perceived as the person who sits at the counter and watches over the books. But the role of librarians is to promulgate, not to guard. I'll give you an example: In recent years many audio and video CDs have been brought into libraries in the United States and there is a lot of demand for this. Not long ago I met a public librarian who complained about it. He said: 'People just want discs. It's driving us crazy. We are considering the cancellation of this service.' I was astonished by this way of looking at things. From my perspective it's demand that is the problem. The librarians don't learn management. People need to realize that information has no value if society doesn't know it exists."