Google as personal scholar

When someone wants to "check on something," one of the most common reference sources is now Google -- it is replacing not only research librarians but also libraries. It will help you check your spelling, arithmetic, track packages and airline flights, look up product codes, find the closest pizza place, ...

I was just reading about Jerome (of Vulgate fame), who was a "scholar" as well as later a translator, and I thought how we've come almost full circle with Google. In his day (350 AD), there weren't books or handy libraries, so if you wanted to "look something up" to verify accuracy, you hired a smart person -- a scholar who earned his or her living that way. If you were rich enough, you hired one all to yourself. Then libraries made access to fact-checking more available to the common folk. Next, individual homes acquired a dictionary and encyclopedia of their own -- an 'in-house' library for checking facts. More recently, broad-band cable provided easy access to an electronic, distributed library. And, finally, a smart person all my own: Google. I go to it for the simplest question. We have a number of CD-based encyclopedias (and hard-copy Encyclopedia Britannica, giving away my era), but I go to our personal scholar for questions ranging from spelling to, as it happened, Jerome: he lived in Bethlehem for at least 15 years. Google helped set that straight, just as Jerome would have two millennia ago.