Recently my mentee at UIUC GSLIS asked me to look into my crystal ball and articulate some thoughts about what lies in store for technical services librarianship. What follows is my response. I publish this here because although my points aren’t polished and well-defined, what I wrote to my mentee expresses some of what I personally think about library-related topics that are popular right now.
Where do I start?! Those who work in tech. svcs. are in need, more than ever, of a management mindset. Not necessarily management responsibilities, but a management mindset. By this I mean that we need to understand the broader pressures and trends that managers, especially upper-level managers, have to cope with and prepare for. We can no longer be (if we ever were) narrowly focused on, say, cataloging of print books and only print books. This luxury only exists in a handful of really large or special libraries. We need to be very aware of user-oriented trends such as the whole “social web” or Web 2.0 discussion, and how that might alter user expectations of what we provide to them in terms of access paths to information.
In terms of concerns and anxieties, well…I am reminded of a quote I always see in the signature of emails written by a friend of mine: “Delete: Bathwater. Undelete: Baby.” This causes a smile to come to me every time I see it. Put simply, I worry that in the rush toward new technologies, new ways of interacting with and meeting the needs of users, too many of my colleagues find it easy to forget or ignore what is in the past. In many ways I do believe the Bible verse that states something like this: “There is nothing new under the sun.” I believe this has application in libraries. We are not to be bound (pardon the small pun) by the past, necessarily, but we at least need to acknowledge a.) that there is a past and b.) understand at least some of that past to put the present and future into a right perspective. I’ve said this to people over and over again and I’ll repeat it here as an example of this point. About 10 years ago, when I was new to the profession, one of the really hot topics was outsourcing of technical services work. People were either up in arms against this trend or actively applauding it as revolutionary and innovative. Truth is, it was neither. Outsourcing has existed for a very long time in libraries and one big example of this is in the realm of shared cataloging. The Library of Congress distributed its cataloging records on 3×5 cards to other libraries throughout the U.S. and (maybe) the world, as long ago as the early 1900s. That is outsourcing!
Particularly in this era of the “social web” I am worried by so many librarians who are leading “the revolution” and proclaiming how wonderful and how great everything is that relates to blogs, wikis, instant messaging, etc. Those things ARE great but please, folks, get some perspective on them! Understand that libraries have ALWAYS striven to be social and interactive and patron-oriented. The way some of the library technorati talk these days, you’d think that libraries have been forbidding prisons until the social web came about. That’s ridiculous. Most of what is new is actually evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Don’t get me wrong: I am heartily in favor of trying new things, of experimenting, of innovating, etc. My wife calls me a technogeek and I guess that’s an accurate made-up word. My problem is just that new developments need to be understood and perceived through the lens of historical perspective.
Hear! Hear!