Culture
The Public Librarians Who Serve as Human Google
The New York Public Library’s reference service still handles 30,000 calls a year.
Need an answer? Google it. Or ask Siri, or Alexa, or one of the other friendly digital assistants that the tech titans have invented to slake our curiosity. For most of us, our autonomic reflex in moments of knowledge-seeking is to query the godlike and omniscient World Wide Web. Where else would answers even live?