Is Internet evolving into a Digital Library?

Terry Kuny and Gary Cleveland in their article  “The Digital Library: Myths and Challenges" IFLA journal 1998 24 (2)7347 had rejected Internet as Digital Library. They regarded it a myth to consider it as a digital library. As a bookstore cannot be called a Library in the same manner Internet providing access to huge information resources cannot considered as a Library.  “Finding information is difficult, the quality of the information is quite variable, and reliable, professional assistance for the confused and lost is lacking”.

I have been keenly observing in past few years the emergence of a trend to organize the Internet (WEB) resources so that these are useful to the potential users. Yahoo  was probably the first popular tool to hand pick and organize information resources into categories. Then came the voluntary efforts to create an Open Directory (Open Directory Project). 

Yet another landmark I consider is the emergence of social tagging platforms like Del.icio.us for bookmaking and Flickr to share Photos. Interestingly Nature Publishing Group produced Open Source Software – Connotea and a free site to “help researchers and clinicians manage and share information”. It handles academic references far better than Del.icio.us. Now only days back Goggle launched Google Co-op. Here you can categorize the URLs in way you know better and people can subscribe to your categorization. This means that now you as a librarian can categorize and organization the web resources in a manner that could be useful for your patrons!! Well it is expected that they subscribe to your categories while searching. And this has started happening - Just noted that [US] National Library of Medicine is a major contributor. 

So Is Internet evolving into a Digital Library?