there has been no serious attempt by digital media developers to engage in a constructive public dialogue with historians of information and leading librarians. There is, perhaps, a reason for this. As Geoffrey Nunberg starkly revealed in 2009 in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Google cannot celebrate the history of indexing and cataloguing because it would draw attention to its matrix of errors. As of yet, Google Books does not work as an accurate system of cataloguing and searching for books. Nunberg showed that the seemingly clunky nineteenth-century Library of Congress Classification system is still more accurate.

Even the idea of a ‘Google search’ was unimaginable ten years ago.