The Future Looks ‘Dim’ to Some Academic Librarians
For many of the academic librarians employed by the schools and colleges of the information age there is a bleak outlook on the future of their breed. The near future promised by the onset of the new digital library has complicated careers in library science and made unsure the future careers for the academic library staff as a whole. What can seem far in the future to librarians a decade back has now become a potentially grim reality to their field of expertise.
For many centuries, the traditional focus of education and the liberal arts has been the academic library; it has in essence been the central heart of all learning from grade school to the highest levels of mastery. Yet as the 21st century, information technology and the advent of social media upon the masses, it would seem that Universities are seeing a different trend approaching very quickly. Students, faculties and other users seem to be moving towards a new trend in how we are gathering source materials, using information to communicate and teaching one another. It seems that both students our faculty and students are shifting in this trend almost universally; therefore it is not just a mere possibility but a reality.
The Internet in combination with the social media revolution is making academic librarians evaluate what it means to be relevant to the educational systems core from teaching, learning and research at all levels. The librarian of old was a facilitator and an assistant to access of the library as it functions. The library user of today is nearly equally adept at these same functionalities by virtue of being a computer internet user, so the academic librarian is forced to expand their skill set in order to be useful as the digital world expands in the near future.
Still there are some who foresee that the library will soon become the network hub for school, social community portal, information center, home base of free internet access, and pipeline for future pubic technology resources. Librarians need to be cross trained to understand this wider concept of the future and as caretakers of the new libraries they will be able re-think their potential goals for careers, but those willing will be able to still have their jobs. Libraries need to have their in place technology upgraded to see this kind of future fully realized. There will be need to provide the public community with internet service, computers, tablets, laptops, network hubs or interfaces for your smartphones, but this will only be the barest of beginnings.
In the long haul, there will eventually be an overall shifting in the focus for the academic librarian into a kind of technical support assistance operator. It also requires the investment and cooperation of the information technology world from a community level. This will eventually lead to a series of yet to be determined changes in the structure of future libraries and how they serve the public as a whole.
Currently the federal government has made predictions for the fate of libraries based on scenarios that forecast how technology will impact them over the next few decades. Most of these reports predict overall shifts in libraries and their staff within the next fifteen years or less. These are based on current trends in the future of higher education. They not as optimistic as what is already stated in this article, in fact they are quite a bit gloomier by far. Yet none of them are more or less likely at this time and they are at best predictions still at this point in history.
Lucille Stevens writes for the administration courses blog, a non profit blog focused on business administration courses and small business training tips.
