new communities

If librarians are unsuited to the role of personal information coach ("You ain't taking a break until I get 20 items tagged folksolonomogalically"), then we might need to expand what "community" means for us.

We've been used to geographical communities - the local library. And geographical communities are neglected at our peril. But they are no longer the only game in town. The public library system was largely a result of the titanic upheaval of communities wrought by the industrial revolution. Urbanisation and increased literacy rates created the communities that the public libraries served. There are now many communities of which people are a part - professional, aspirational, lifestyle-based. And all of these communities need the skills of librarians.

The big question is: Who's going to pay for this? Is it the government? Is it communities themselves? Some mix of the two? Or no one?

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.

Patrick Lambe's double whammy (1): extinction-level events

Patrick Lambe entitles his IIM keynote On Becoming Extinct. If I am listening correctly, PL basically wants to put a rocket up the information management profession because:

• The information management space is full of different roles from radically different backgrounds (slide 15) and the IM cluster (which includes librarians, records managers & knowledge managers) makes up a small part of this - because the IM cluster professions have failed to understand the opportunities open to them.
• Graduates in these professions are poorly equipped for their roles out there.
• IM professionals tell themselves & others that their roles are unimportant but in fact major organisational disasters of recent times (Challenger, Enron) have been failures of information.
• The IM profession needs entrepeneurs (infopreneurs?), boundary spanners - and its members also need suing (listen to the sound file to find out why).

PL articulates something I have felt for the past decade - since shortly before I got my MSc in Information Studies & Librarianship in fact. I have met infopreneurs over the years but too many in the IM cluster respond to the challenge of the new with "that's not my job, I can't do that".

There is a link here with the previous post on teaching. Teaching (in its myriad forms) is a profession that is being blown inside out by social & technological change. And the future for teachers is a world where most teaching is not done by them. The present for information professionals is a world where most information is not managed by them. What do they do about that?

Well, PL's call to arms is a good place to start.