A couple of my colleagues brought the Taiga Forum "Provacative Statements" of February 20, 2009 to my attention. They are indeed provocative in various ways, although I’m not sure always in the ways intended. I list them below, and comment on some of them.
All statements are prefaced by “Within the next 5 years…”
- … all librarians will be expected to take personal responsibility for their own professional development; each of us will evolve or die. Budget pressures will force administrators to confront the "psychological shadow" cast by tenure and pseudo-tenure that has inhibited them from performing meaningful evaluations and taking necessary personnel actions. Librarians who do not produce will be reassigned or fired. [My comment: Since when has the first line not been true? Did I miss something? As for the last line, only unions leaving the field will allow that to happen. You won’t find me holding my breath on that one.]
- … collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-initiated. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives. [My comment: I really don’t see this as an either/or equation. No doubt we need to make it easier for our users to engage in identifying what they want us to collect, but I don’t see collection development activities disappearing anytime soon. Call me old-fashioned.]
- … Google will meet virtually all information needs for both students and researchers. Publishers will use Google as a portal to an increasing array of content and services that disintermediate libraries. All bibliographic data, excepting what libraries create for local special collections, will be produced and consumed at the network level. [My comment: Yeah, and all copyright law will be repealed as well. Without that, the only way our users will be able to get to the content they discover via Google will be through us. Or maybe Google will just buy up all the publishers and be done with it.]
- … knowledge management will be identified as a critical need on campus and will be defined much more broadly than libraries have defined it. The front door for all information inquiries will be at the university level. Libraries will have a small information service role. [My comment: Huh?]
- … libraries will have given up on the "outreach librarian" model after faculty persistently show no interest in it. Successful libraries will have identified shared goals with teaching faculty and adapted themselves to work at the intersection of librarianship, information technology and instructional technology. [My comment: I have to agree fairly strongly on this one.]
- … libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation, instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology. [My comment: If this ever becomes true it won’t be for some time to come.]
- … libraries will have abandoned the hybrid model to focus exclusively on electronic collections, with limited investments in managing shared print archives. Local unique collections will be funded only by donor contributions.
- … library buildings will no longer house collections and will become campus community centers that function as part of the student services sector. Campus business offices will manage license and acquisition of digital content. These changes will lead campus administrators to align libraries with the administrative rather than the academic side of the organization.
- … the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or regional consortia. [My comment: this is already happening, and the economic downturn only makes this more likely to continue.]
- … 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the decline of the library profession. [My comment: Hey, now you’re just depressing me. Except for that 20% of the ARL directors retiring bit.]
A few are happening now to one degree or another, others may become apparent over the next decade, and others may never happen. But they are definitely provocative in places. Debate among yourselves, then comment below.
© The Taiga Forum -Redistribution and use of the Provocative Statements, with or without modification, are permitted provided that modest attribution is given to the Taiga Forum as originators and owners of the material.
About Roy Tennant
I was interested in your comment on prov. statement #5. I did the lightning talk on that one at the Taiga Forum at ALA midwinter. I did emphasize the importance of the blended role and focusing on shared goals. In you want to take a look at the slides from the lightning talks they are at:
http://www.slideshare.net/kantelman/taiga4lightningtalks-presentation (btw – did you know your comments don’t allow html code – it just blows off you comment). My slides are 19-35 in the slide deck.
If #s 7 & 8 ever come true, they won’t do so within 5 years.
I had to laugh at #1. This is typical AD/AUL fantasizing about how cool it would be just fire people who express skepticism with the bold initiative du jour. Don’t like our plan to replace cataloging with social tagging? Clean out your desk and hit the road, loser!
The slightly threatening tone is also amusing. I’d love to see an library AD appear before a university’s faculty senate and explain why tenure should be eliminated because his pals at the Taiga Forum said so.