[LIS-Forum] The role of librarians in today's world

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends:

A few days ago I spoke at a conference at DRTC about the need for LIS
professionals to ACT and also find a role in these fast changing times.
This morning I found the following article summary in Peter Suber's blog.

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Librarians in the age of digitization and OA
Barbara Quint, The Home Guard, The Searcher, January 2006.

Excerpt:

    What would you do if you had a personal home library numbering in the
thousands or even hundreds of thousands of books? Hire a librarian,
right?! Well, that’s just what every Web user has as the mammoth book
digitization projects by Google, the Open Content Alliance (OCA),
Microsoft, Yahoo!, et al., open up their public domain collections.
Project Gutenberg has offered tens of thousands of such texts for
years. The U.S. Government Printing Office continues to load documents
born in public domain, promising eternal archives for them. The open
access movement has put masses of scholarly content, similar to what
one would expect to find in an academic library’s periodical
collection, into the line of sight of Yahoo! Search, Google Scholar,
Scirus, and other free Web search engines. And that’s only the
material that resembles the traditional content formats that people
expect librarians to handle — books and magazines. Then there’s all
the content out there on the open Web from authoritative or
semi-authoritative or hit-or-miss Web sites. How is a user to tell the
wheat from the chaff, the plums from the prunes, the true from the
false? Hire an information professional, right?! Well, we know they
need us, but do they?...If we information professionals, we
librarians, want to serve users, we have to bring our services to
where and when the user needs us....Let’s start with three basic
principles and one overall goal. Principle One: Our solutions operate
on Web time and in Web calendars, i.e., 24/7/365 (366 in leap year).
Principle Two: Our solutions conserve our time, energy, and expertise
by solving problems as Web-wide as possible. Principle Three: Moving a
vendor to provide a solution constitutes a successful solution for us.
Goal One: We need to get credit for our solutions, if only in order to
get enough influence and resources to make more. Time to roll up our
virtual sleeves and get to work.

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Best wishes.

Subbiah Arunachalam