information coaching

As you may know, I'm a librarian by training. Mark Pesce writes about a new(ish) role for librarians:

Some of this won’t come to pass until you move out of the libraries and into the streets. Library scientists have to prove their worth; most people don’t understand that they’re slowly drowning in a sea of their own information.

Check out the comments by Philippe Van Nedervelde BTW. David Pollard has also written extensively about the importance of personal information management (PIM) and like Philippe he shares an enthusiasm in David Allen's Getting Things Done (no, not that one).

The challenge for librarians is to move away from The Collection. The justification for the library was that books (and hence information) were expensive and scarce for the masses. Hence the initial focus of librarians was creating and managing collections. And we saw this is a responsibility that we did on behalf of a community. Whether for the public or the academy or some other group, we managed books and periodicals. We played a role of mediation - gatekeeper or matchmaker.

Two things have happened in the interim. One visible and one less so.

The first thing was that the information landscape got more complicated. First with records and radio then TV, video, DVDs, CDs, mp3s, ebooks, ejournals, webpages galore. Even with the book, higher earning power means that people can buy many of the books they want (if they want them). Many librarians will tell you that much of the good stuff isn't free. And that's true but the care factor is low. Good enough will do for many. This much is obvious.

But the second thing is much less remarked upon. The communities we serve are not what they were 100 years ago. The public librarian faces an urban (or suburban) environment rather than a rural one - with an array of ethnic groups, special constituencies and transients. The academic world has expanded into a billion-dollar business and organisations see employees come, go and return as contractors.

Librarians can survive the fragmentation of the book but their real struggle is to comprehend what their communities are becoming. Mark P talks about librarians as “life coaches” but the image that comes to my mind is the librarian as Ronin. Coaches have always focused on the individual whereas librarians have always focused on their communities.

I'd like to see librarians more engaged with their communities - beyond the library (be it paper or electronic). If the role of the investigative journalist is to "follow the money" then the role of the librarian is to "follow the information". Information is everywhere. It touches everything. If librarians follow the scent of information we end up back out in the community, where we belong.