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.
Highlights:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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