wisdom in information

Paul Duguid gave a talk on the
"quality of information" here at Cornell.
Since this was given to librarians, the focus was on where libraries, and
librarians will fit.
Several points to note:
my paraphrasing:

We have been hoping that Moore's law would help us out
of our info-quagmire-- that better search engines, and organizing tools would
gave us tools to deal with the flood of information. That has not happened.
GooglePrint points to certain print resources but not others.
Why did a result formerly point to a dover edition and then change to a Penguin
edition.

One of his conclusions -- branding is more than a commercial tactic, it is
also a mechanism used in many communities to certify (or decertify) reliability.
My paraphrase: "Disintermediation has failed (?) because one of the
primary functions of the intermediary, in the information realm is to certify,
or legitimate, information as valuable reusable knowledge, and not just
transient assertion."