I’m a Philosophy Subject Librarian, I’m supposed to know about existential angst.

In the last week, I’ve been obsessing about what libraries and the profession will look like in 30 years or so when I retire. I’ve been wondering what we should do now to shape that.

OK, I’ll start with what don’t we do anymore.

• We’re not only about books. And haven’t been for decades
• We are no longer gatekeepers of knowledge, popular and obscure. Public libraries are reducing their non-fiction and reference collections. Not only are undergraduates using information from Google Scholar as the basis of their assignments, but academics are letting them.
• We aren’t “halls of shush”. Unless your library has a silent floor, there is no longer an oasis of peace and studiousness in our buildings.
• Archives and libraries of deposit have become representative rather than comprehensive records.
• Not all of our collection is contained in our buildings anymore.
• Our clients can use our services without direct contact with any of our staff.
• Most of us do very little original cataloguing.

This destabilizes me a little. Back when I was 8 or so and catalogued my Enid Blytons, I knew that when I grew up and was a librarian, I would work in a quiet library looking after books, cataloguing and processing them and helping people find information. It was what librarians DID.

I think tonight’s bout of “I don’t know what we do anymore”, was partly prompted by reading Karen Schneider‘s rant on ALA Techsource, Dear Library of Congress…. where she suggests that instead of loooking at bibliographic control as a major issue, the profession is in a state of emergency and we need to address what we are selling out, to whom and what that does to our basic tenets – one of which is the right to read.

Here’s a chunkette that I found particularly relevant. (By the way, I hope “rant” isn’t offensive – ranting articulately and effectively is a talent I wish I had).

It is both ironic and poignant that librarians are still worrying about “bibliographic control,” after ceding so much of the same to the companies that now rent them journal access per annum at usurious rates, digitize their book collections into DRM obscurity, or sell them ponderous, antiquated “management” systems that on close inspection do little more than serve as storehouses for the metadata specific to the formats of bygone eras, bold days when we saw our central roles as defenders and curators of our cultural heritage.

We have moved from the librarian as information artisan—a professional creating and using tools to manage information—to the librarian as surrogate vendor, facilitating what is essentially the offshoring of thousands of years of information into private hands.

UPDATE 10.03.07: CindiAnn was also was struck by this passage in Karen’s post and her response, Library Agitprop , presents 7 theses about the future of libraries. Worth checking out.