Role of Librarians

[Donald A. Barclay]

While I was (obviously, I hope) joking when I wrote that libraries and 
librarians would be done in by the Internet just as radio was done in by 
television, there was a serious and unspoken side to the analogy.

Radio in 1995 is very different from radio in 1945.  And while I don't 
think that libraries are going to disappear because of the Internet, I 
would guess that the difference between libraries and librarians in 2045 
versus 1995 will be as great as the difference between radio today and 
radio fifty years ago.  

I like analogies. (Which of course are never exact.  If they were, they
wouldn't be instructive.  It tells us nothing to say that a library is
like a library.) When I see a freight train tearing across New Mexico made
up partly of boxcars and partly of flatcars carrying semi-trailers, I
think:  "There goes libraries and the Internet."


Donald A. Barclay 
New Mexico State University Library     always the beautiful answer
dbarclay at lib.nmsu.edu                   who asks a more beautiful question 
                                                    --e.e. cummings