Connected

In LIS 2000 (Understanding Information), the group discussion this week involves the question of whether libraries and librarians themselves are becoming obsolete. As technology evolves, more e-books are created, more journals are scanned, and more articles and books are published directly on the internet, and so on. Will this lead to less trips to the library, less hard copies being checked out, less human librarians needed to help with research?

In one word: Yes.

It is extremely faster and more convenient to be able to access the information you need from the internet in the comfort of your own home instead of traveling to the library, searching the catalog, wandering around the stacks, lugging massive books around, and hoping it has the quote or piece of text that you need. (I actually happen to love this part of researching, but I know there are not many of us left.) If there's a rare italian 17th century book that an art history student needs for a thesis, instead of going through the inter-library loan process and waiting weeks or months for the book, the student can possibly just have the scanned copy sent to them in days. If they're lucky.

If the librarian of tomorrow is smart, she will embrace the technological evolutions to avoid the threat of obsolescence.

In addition to the new ways of finding information, I think that it's also very important to stay up to date with the different ways of sharing information. With the ever growing social networks, blogs, webpages, and so on, it's definitely not difficult to share information...the hard part is keeping up with all of the different ways of sharing. In addition to having three email addresses (work, personal, and school), a Facebook account, a MySpace profile (if people still use MySpace anymore), and this newly created blog, I also created a Twitter account after discussing with my friends the benefits of following "tweets." I am so connected it's scary.