Tracing the Archetypal Academic Librarian

A century of phenomenal advances in information technology has resulted in the exponential growth of information, and there is no end in sight. The modern world, what communications theorist Daniel Bell (1973) dubbed the post industrial “knowledge society,” has become so swamped with information, misinformation, and propaganda that neologisms like “information explosion” and “infoglut” have been invented to describe a state of profound saturation: a cognitive overload that increases uncertainty potentially to paralysis. The proliferation of so many new storage formats complicates things further, potentially limiting access to, and the lifespan of, the “memory of humankind.” A “digital dark age” looms.