Internet librarian: Andrew Carnegie, Seattle, and the Internet.(Information Technology)

It's February in Seattle. If that conjures images of hip people in Gore-Tex and fleece clutching lattes and dodging rain, you're mostly right. (We don't dodge--what's the point?) This year, though, February will be a little brighter, as a few thousand of our colleagues join us for the Public Library Association conference.

As I was thinking about welcoming the PLA folks to town, I started to contemplate the act of philanthropy that boosted the American public library movement around the turn of the last century. Andrew Carnegie paid for the construction of 2,509 libraries in North America and around the world. Without that money, it's difficult to imagine how things might have been different, in the library world …