Saturday, April 19, 2008

More Praise for the Library and a Few Thoughts on Librarians

The authors at Writers Plot have each weighed in with a contribution to the celebration of National Library Week. Leann Sweeney, Sheila Connolly, Kate Flora, Lorraine (L.L.) Bartlett, aka Lorna Barrett and Jeanne Munn Bracken have all posted their thoughts on what libraries mean to them, as readers, writers and book lovers.

Though some people (even librarians) claim librarianship is a dying profession, I'd prefer to think of it as a changing profession. With all the information available on the Internet, we still need librarians to help us find the best information, as quickly as possible. Doing research on the Internet can be (as the saying goes) like drinking water from a firehose. You can end up drowning in too much of it and Google doesn't distinguish between crappy information and sound information.

So, as long as we need to find reliable information expediently, there will be a role for the librarian or independent information professional. There isn't a search engine yet that can provide the human element of good judgment.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Pageviews Last 30 Days

Followers