this is not the future of libraries

amy posted this April 8th, 2011 | filed under: headdesk, ranting, revolution | 10 comments »


above is a screengrab from a presentation given today by the Jeff Trzeciak, University Librarian at McMaster. i encourage you to watch his whole talk here.
i am all for bringing in people with new skills.
i am all for gutting and redesigning our spaces to meet user needs.
and i am all for radical transformation in libraryland.
but mostly, i am for LIBRARIANS running LIBRARIES.

the revolution is coming. librarians wanted.

10 Comments on “this is not the future of libraries”

  1. 1 retro gal said at 4:26 pm on April 8th, 2011:

    If Jeff doesn’t know that PhDs shouldn’t be hyphenated (i.e. possessive), he has no business being a librarian. Not sure if I’ll use my time to watch the talk…

  2. 2 This is not the library of the future…I hope | The Sports Librarian said at 7:22 pm on April 8th, 2011:

    [...] Click here for more [...]

  3. 3 The Future of Academic Librarianship? « A Blog on LIST said at 9:39 pm on April 8th, 2011:

    [...] not only touched a nerve with me but with others in the biblioblogosphere. Jenica Rogers and Amy Buckland have posted similarly on their blogs. And I concur. Not only are libraries important, but so are [...]

  4. 4 George Peckham-Rooney said at 2:43 pm on April 10th, 2011:

    I agree with your sentiments that I would like to see librarians in library. Librarians yielded library technology to IT in the 80s and I think losing more ground would be a mistake as we’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

    Though I wouldn’t rule out a PHD-MLIS partnership with PHDs acting as content area specialists while the MLIS handles access, information literacy etc. I think the profession has the change in the face of cultural changes in information consumption.

  5. 5 FNG said at 7:29 am on April 11th, 2011:

    Retro Gal, one of my favourite Kurt Vonnegut quotes was “…profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.”
    Maybe we should add poor spelling/grammar to the list?

  6. 6 Quagdhu said at 8:28 am on April 11th, 2011:

    retro gal – that’s an apostrophe not a hyphen. you were saying…?

  7. 7 Academic Librarianship – A Dying Profession or An Omen…? | University of Toronto Academic Librarians said at 6:03 pm on April 13th, 2011:

    [...] http://jambina.com/blog/this-is-not-the-future-of-libraries/ [...]

  8. 8 Rosie Redfield said at 11:00 pm on April 16th, 2011:

    Retro gal, what’s the name of that great internet rule saying that every comment pointing out a writing error will contain an error of its own?

  9. 9 Informationista said at 9:20 pm on April 19th, 2011:

    As If! Clearly he’s not seen the recent announcement by Dartmouth about the appointment of Bill Garrity from Head of the Library to Director of Academic and Campus IT Services in Computing Services at Dartmouth. He started April 1st! THAT’S the future for librarians. . . they’re taking over IT because they have the broad view of users, usability, and content. http://list.umassmed.edu/read/messages?id=118602

  10. 10 LJ said at 8:06 am on April 20th, 2011:

    My experience has been that librarians are not ready to hire other librarians that come from other fields or communities of practice. It certainly has improved because our degree programs are evolving the nature of librarianship, but many of the positions still require a set amount of years experience in libraries and this is stunting the growth of our practice.

join the conversation!

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