This was a dangerous question. I could spend something like the next year playing with this stuff.
Just to move things along, though, I got arbitrary and looked at a service called www.yelp.com. This site is billed as "the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what's great -and not so great- in your area."
Well, not my area. It's a new service and it is clearly based in California. How can I tell?
The service gives you a hint. Something like 75 California cities are profiled compared to one (Baltimore) in Maryland. So, if you want to find information about Albany, it better be the Albany that's in California. The Albany in New York is nowhere to be found.
On the other hand, I was in Albany, New York, a few years back. I had pneumonia at the time and had to drive about seven hours to get there. Looking around when I arrived at my destination, I realized that having pneumonia would probably be the high point of the trip.
Anyway, to get back to what I'm supposed to be talking about, yelp looks like a fairly good piece of directory software. It arrests all the usual suspects - restaurants, hotels, shopping, etc. - plus some less usual (but still common enough) suspects such as education. Unfortunately I didn't see libraries listed in the education category but I was able to do a search in the directory's search window. When I did, Enoch Pratt popped up pretty quickly.
The role of a service like yelp as far as libraries are concerned is, at the very least, to make sure they are included in the local yelp directory. Also, though, if yelp ever decided that (even though it isn't in California) Howard County is worth a directory, this could be an extremely useful source of local directory information. Of course, the big search engines are already pretty good at providing local directory information but, as they say, the more the merrier.
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