Today seems like as good a day as any to think grim thoughts about the future of scholarship.

At the Britannica Blog, Michael Gorman, newly retired as dean of library services at CSU Fresno, warns against “the siren song of the Internet.” He argues that the new era of online databases has been wildly oversold: “To think that digitization is the answer to all that ails the world is to ignore the uncomfortable fact that most people, young and old, prefer to interact with recorded knowledge and literature in the form of print on paper.”

Gorman’s post is part of a larger forum devoted to the evolution of online publishing. Gorman’s earlier missives last week drew skeptical replies from Free Range Librarian, Pattern Recognition, and NYU’s Clay Shirky.

David Lee King, a librarian in Topeka, went the extra mile and composed a song whose lyrics are culled from fragments of Gorman’s posts. King’s project probably won’t make Gorman feel any better about “digital Maoism.”

In The Chronicle in 2005, Gorman debated the Google Books project with the U. of Michigan’s John Wilkin.