Whither the librarians ...

This semester I have a course on 'Mass Media' and I'm learning a little about the Internet, social sites, blogs and other other topics related to Media and Mass Media. One of the things that the Internet has brought us is information. Huge amounts of it.Heck, we're drowning in it. It's a conspiracy junkies delight as now they have 'proof' that we never reached the moon, the earth is flat and many other topics that they (loosely) keep under their tin hats. Within a few minutes, using any search engine, I can probably get a dozen different pages that say a dozen different things about any particular topic. When all is said and done how do I know what is right and what is wrong? In the past you could generally trust books in the library because they were a bit expensive and difficult to produce (try writing a book some time and you'll know what I mean). Today anyone can, and will, write on any topic, without fact checking and declare themselves a fountain of useful information. It used to be that when we wanted to research material we went to the research librarian (not the lady behind the main desk sorting books) to get help doing research. Not today, we now have Google and a dozen different search engines but we basically can't trust the information that's presented to us. From my class I've learned that librarians want to come up with a new system. One that will again put the librarians' talent to use and hopefully bring some renewed level of trust back to the information we need. Hopefully my class will go into further detail. Maybe, when I have to write a term paper, that can be the topic of my paper. Outside this class I don't have time to look up such information as my interests lie with other topics that need as much of my attention as does this class. Someone has to help rebuild the level of trust in the information we use to make decisions on a daily basis. Lets face it information is the new currency.