Later this week our PVLD management team and all of our full-time librarians are gathering for a discussion, facilitiated by Joan Frye Williams and George Needham, on the topic of what it means to be a professional in the 21st century.
As so often happens in the serendipitous world of the blogosphere, this morning I happened across a guest post on Tame the Web that pointed me to this challenging blog post predicting that public libraries will be dead within 15 years by Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company from a few months ago. It's a response to media reports about a comment he made in a speech at the private Atwater Library in Montreal, and makes compelling argument that e-books will essentially kill the public library (what he calls the consumer library...as opposed to academic and other libraries with a more specialized purpose), and that all of the things our profession talks about as reasons for continued existance - unique local content, programs and activites, access for the underserved - will not be sufficient to justify the investment in our infrastruture, or alternatively will so fundamentally change what we are that the term "library" will no longer apply.
In his post Shatzkin systematically debunks many of the most cherished arguments of public librarians, as articulated very clearly by Gary Price, but agrees with Price on an important and intriguing point - "that librarianship will be needed by people long after buildings full of books are not", requiring a whole new and as yet unimagined business model.
If Shatzkin is right and we need a new business model that is not about delivery of content in the form of books, or about bridging the digital divide, or about offering programs in a community center model, or reliant on the creation, preservation and distribution of local content....what is it?
I'm looking forward to hearing what ideas our supervisors and librarians have when we get together later this week, and wish I had a clearer vision myself!
Happy holidays, Kathy! Enjoy the break: you deserve it!
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