Today I discovered Educause. Well, discovered isn’t quite right, but it’s been tagged on my del.icio.us for a while, and I hadn’t quite got round to looking at it. I’m finding that’s the problem with my delicious- I’m using it as a to be read pile, but I forget that it’s there, to be read…Maybe I should get some yahoo pipes action going to pipe me my To be Read Pile. Periodically. With a big flashing “look at this” sign…

At any rate, the boss sent me an extract from James Neal’s podcast “A Steady Vision for Libraries“. It was pretty good; I’ve been put off by op-ed issues from bigwigs before… I thought his vision of libraries in the Millennial World was pretty inspiring actually,

We still have a core responsibility to identify, to capture, to organize, and to enable the scholarly record from across the world- through use and then preservation. Whether that information is captured in print or in various multimedia formats digitally, our responsibility doesn’t change. p1

Hurrah! You heard it here first- format is dead…

I thought his comments about staffing were pretty insightful too

And I think we are seeing much more of an entrepreneurial spirit in libraries today. We hire people who are committed to rethinking traditional structures and traditional processes to enable us not only to use our resources much more effectively and efficiently but also to be at the front end of some of these changes that we are experiencing. . . .

I’ve been thinking a lot about technology in the library recently; partly because I’m interviewing at a library where I’ve been warned that one of the interviewers is a print fanatic. I came across this quote from Renoir, (y’know, as you do) who stated that photography released painters from the drudgery of portrait painting. One of the next big movements that came along was Impressionism, one of my favourites, so great things happened in this case. I consequently started wondering what drudgery computers released librarians from? Ready Reference? Search? To a certain extent, yes, but we all know there’s an awful lot of bad information about there and people still have trouble finding what they need, even though theoretically there’s infinite times more stuff…. Or maybe it released us from the drudgery of, well, libraries, and allowed us to look more at publishing (digital libraries), content provision, access, copyright etc etc. It’s a tricky one- at first I was I up there with Renoir, but on reflection, I still use print sources (IMF, I’m talking to you), I still really respect librarians with traditional search techniques, and I want to learn more from them. In a way, I guess I was trying to explore the technology divide; I immediately interpreted Renoir’s quote as “oh my gosh I’m so lucky to be a librarian today; think of a library without [insert technology of choice here]” but, I think Mr Neal’s quote really puts it all in context. Librarians have always wanted to connect patrons and information, and I don’t think all the technological advances of the past twenty years have changed that; we’re just reinterpreting library provision, as Mr Neal says.

Well, I’m not sure I make any sense, but I really liked that quote and wanted to get my first thoughts down. More to follow possibly!