I'm a big fan of Rory Litwin and his blog. I remember reading a great piece he wrote a few years ago entitled The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Privacy. Certainly worth a read.
Anyway, he has another great piece entitled Our niche and how to get back into it. This opens with the following gambit :-
More and more, I find that the library profession’s efforts to stay relevant in the age of information technology are in fact eroding our relevance. As a result of these efforts, it is becoming less and less clear what we offer that is different from what everybody else offers in the information economy.
He then proceeds to say:-
I have a good idea of how I use my knowledge of our resources, and I know that I wish I knew more. I don’t wish I knew more about our search tools – those are designed to be easy to use for librarians and the public alike, and I don’t regard our ability to use them as anything special. Where I feel that greater knowledge would help me to be a better librarian is across the board – within my assigned subject areas, yes, but in all subjects, and particularly about things like scholarly communities, the research into reading behavior, learning theory, media studies, and all of those fields that are connected to what we do. I think that improving my general knowledge and working to improve my insight into people are the most effective ways I can work to become a better librarian.
Thought provoking.
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