Issues like Mr. Exxon and his successors will have to be dealt with somehow. It will involve libraries, library users, and all of society. Let me return for a minute to the issue of disintermediation. I don't believe it. At the Office of Technology Assessment, I hung around with too many social scientists to believe that institutions disappear.
Institutions have much more fundamental functions within society.
They may be shaped or have their nature directed by the technology. A library based on books may look somewhat different from a library based on electronic technology, but the basic function of the institution is much more robust than that. Now I've hung around with technologists much too much to be unaware of the fact that they're almost always wildly optimistic. Technologists often tend to hate institutions. They really are freewheeling anarchists and think of their technology always as freeing them from the bureaucracy and the restrictions of past institutions.