Librarians have a reputation for living in a world of their own and they certainly have their own long-established traditions. Their acronyms may be longer than ours, but the problems they have been wrestling with for centuries are exactly the ones we all face in today’s Age of Infoglut: how to organize information and knowledge so that it can be easily found and reused. Today’s information owners have a lot to learn from librarians.

So can librarians save the world? This presentation argues that they can at least make a significant contribution to solving the problem of infoglut, but only if they update their skill set and understand how the concepts they have worked with for decades can be applied using modern technologies like Topic Maps.

This presentation attempts to bridge the gap between the two communities, showing how the concepts that librarians both love and hate are related to Topic Maps and to the more general vision of subject-centric computing.