This is a blog about my profession, not my job. So I won’t bore anyone with accounts of the sessions I have attended at this conference regarding “job” stuff.
What I do want to talk about, though, is the opening session/keynote address given by Bob Cringely. Other bloggers have done a great job of summarizing, so I won’t “re-invent the wheel,” as so many librarians seem to like to say. Here’s Terry Ballard’s take on what happened, and Bill Topritzhofer’s account.
Bob touched on a few points in his speech that I’d like to address.
1. The disappearance of the physical manifestations of knowledge in libraries. In short, libraries are not going to be all about books. If you ask me, I’d say this is already true, but will become even more so in the future. And that’s OK, all you shocked book lovers out there. I’ve long felt that the role of the “library of the future” has more to do with education and the interpretation of information than with books. Which leads me to another of his points.
2. Librarians will be of value because of their expertise in handling knowledge. Here is how we stay relevant. Of course, that means that it has to be true that librarians are experts in finding, organizing, and interpreting information, no matter what the format of that info is. Which in turn means keeping up with the technological changes that will continue to accelerate. If you don’t want to keep current now, that’s fine. But don’t expect to be able to make a valuable contribution to your profession or your patrons in the radically different library environment of twenty years from now.
3. We tend to overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. To me, this was a real AHA statement. It seems like many librarians (me too!) love to try and jump on the new interesting stuff that is out there, but then get disappointed when the new technologies, etc aren’t adopted by the general public right away. Then the efforts get abandoned as “failures.” How discouraging. It’s even more discouraging when things catch on later and become part of mainstream culture, but we seem like we “missed the boat” because our abandoned efforts were ahead of their time. Bob mentioned ebooks as a great example… remember when ebooks were all the rage in libraries… but nowhere else? Well, they’re coming back eventually, once the planets of social and economic forces have properly aligned, of course. Will we be ready? I sure hope so. I also hope that all of the great Web 2.0 initiatives that may or may not be a little ahead of their time will not be abandoned by discouraged librarians who don’t see enough ROI on their projects right away. I hope that we can all be patient with this… it’s coming, and it’s coming BIG TIME.
Overall, I really liked the keynote speech. It was engaging and fun, and the speaker made some great points about the future of libraries. And I think his message was received well, although I did sense some ruffled feathers when he talked about the disappearance of the book.
The world is going to be very different in 10, 15, 20 years. The baby boomers will have become our elderly population, Gen X and Y types like myself will be sending their kids off to college, and those kids (like my one year old, who already knows how to use a mouse) will be entering adulthood with a whole new set of expectations. Libraries and library professionals will need to adapt in order to remain relevant in that new world.
Where will your library be in 2027? Or should I say, Who will it be?
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