OCLC

Tim Bray, well know in the XML crowd, has an essay on OCLC on his site.

It's Time, Long past time, in fact, to take the worlds' OPACs, and especially WorldCat, and build a general-purpose research tool for everybody; with this and Google we would really be covering the bases.

The community of librarians has devoted tens of thousands of lives, in aggregate, to the stewardship of this remarkable body of knowledge, and it is just wrong that it isn't an everyday part of the Web.

1st seen on Perl4Lib