We have, as a profession, largely defined ourselves as controllers, organizers, and retrievers of information. Please consider that in 1999, the technology is in place and in use to create documents dynamically, appearing for the first and possibly only time depending on the user and her request. The Internet has already rendered itself useless for many purposes through unrestrained growth. Any reasonable extrapolation based on current growth rates suggests that the majority of human knowledge will be in electronic form within our lifetimes. While there will continue to be traditional cataloging for defined datasets, we might as well accept that controlled vocabulary is impossible to apply to cyberspace, even assuming it could be agreed upon.
Search engines themselves are another area of promise and concern.
The most fundamental concern, only likely to get worse, is the reliance on commercial vendors to provide indexing and searching tools. There is much to be said for private enterprise. Nonethless, it might be in the best interests of everyone for the national libraries to provide more leadership in this area, if not more direct control. There is too much potential for abuse if access to information is totally or largely determined by commercial interests. In addition, if the days of controlled vocabulary truly are numbered, then obviously keyword searching and pattern matching must become more effective and more transparent.