Librarians of the future - Online debate
Jinfo Blog

2nd December 2009

By Penny Crossland

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For those of us not sponsored by employers to attend the Online 2009 conference, the free seminar programme on the exhibition floor is a useful alternative and generally provides visitors with a range of interesting, useful and thought-provoking sessions. Amongst several insightful seminars on the first day of Online 2009, the European Librarians Theatre provided a venue for an interesting cross-country comparison on the future of libraries and librarians. Representatives from Spain, Italy, France, Finland, the UK and the US presented their views of the future of the profession. Interestingly, there is a wide divergence between countries in the public perception of libraries and librarians. The Italian speaker, Gimena Campos Cervera, SLA Europe‘s Information Professional of the Year (http://digbig.com/5basfk) painted a rather bleak picture of the library sector in her country, which suffers from minimal government funding and low usage of public libraries. Librarians themselves have an old-fashioned image, there are few library schools and training in new technologies is poor. The problems in the sector are compounded by the lack of recruitment agencies specializing in information professionals and patchy broadband connections throughout the country. Finland, on the other hand has long had a reputation for being one of the more advanced countries in terms of broadband connectivity and usage of news technologies, which was confirmed by Pentti Vattulainen of the Finnish National Repository Library (http://digbig.com/5basfm). Finnish public libraries are well-funded and seen as part of the democratic process. Vattulainen presented a long-term view of the future of libraries, quoting futurologist Richard Watson’s book (http://www.futuretrendsbook.com/). Watson predicts that libraries and copyright will no longer exist by 2020, that the desktop PC will be extinct by 2025 and that we will all eventually return to an analogue world. In the short term, Vattulainen called for more library consortia and collaboration between public and academic libraries. He strongly believes that e-books will play a large part in shaping the future of libraries. Book lending will diminsh in favour information provision. Tomas Baiget of Spain argued that many traditional library tasks such as cataloguing, simple searching and book lending are gradually being eroded and that other professions are treading on the librarians‘ patch. As reiterated by other panellists, Baiget believed one the main problems lies with the name and called for the term‘ librarian‘ to be changed in favour of one of the many alternatives available. He called for information professionals to be more proactive and to hone their marketing, technology and communication skills in order to survive as a profession. Anne Caputo, President-elect of SLA ( http://digbig.com/5basfn) referred to the association’s alignment study, which found that corporate librarians were not aligned to the expectations and requirements of the business world and were not good at proving their value to the organisations they work in. Caputo proposed a name change for the profession to ‘strategic knowledge professionals‘. Myriel Brouland of France, a specialist in information and records management believes librarians will become increasingly necessary in managing ‘new‘ data and called for the profession to evolve as knowledge management consultants. Finally, Neil Infield, Manager of the British Library’s Business and IP centre( http://digbig.com/5basfp) believes that information professionals need to add value to their traditional library skills. We should not forget that we provide a customer service and need to acquire marketing and communication skills in order to move with the times. All panellists however, agreed that a name change alone will not affect the publics‘ attitude towards the profession – librarians themselves need to change how they work and position themselves above the parapet.

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