The central question:
Academic librarians are living in “chaotic times” according to David W. Lewis in this week’s Webinar of the Week.
Lewis argues the chaos is brought on by the many forces facing academic libraries and librarians, including persistent digital disruption, the economics of information, and lagging demographic shifts within the profession, to name a few. (Check out 21:30–25:20 for a discussion of the current academic library workforce and how and why it doesn’t look like the larger population.)
In a landscape with so many tectonic forces grinding within it, this webinar asks, and offers some answers to the question, “What does it mean to be a library and a librarian as our collections go away?”
Ok, yeah, so what does it mean?
It means librarians have their work cut out for them. According to David, librarians need to do at least six things in order to adapt to the contemporary world and prepare for the future.
"What does it mean to be a library and a librarian as our collections go away?"
Librarians need to:
- Define the job
- Create the library as place
- Retire legacy print collections
- Preserve digital content
- Make the money work
- Work with the smart machine
That’s all good and well, you may say, but how exactly are we supposed to do that? Are there concrete steps? That’s exactly where this webinar ends, so I’d encourage you to check it out if you’re curious.
The Takeaway.
Librarians know their jobs are evolving, but when struggling with change at your desk and on the job, it can be difficult to see how your personal disruption fits into a larger context. In this webinar David W. Lewis articulates exactly what he thinks the forces are that are changing libraries, why he thinks they’re happening, and what libraries need to do to adapt.
Ten years from now we can look back and assess whether he’s right or not, but for now, taking a clear-eyed look at the profession seems like a good place to start.
