Nate, excellent point all around. I recently read a post by Lorcan Dempsey in which he reviewed a paper on cyberinfrastructure. He pointed out that there are opportunities at the consortium level for supporting the kind of infrastructure we need to do this. For us it means getting the CIC to cooperate on these issues.

We can definitely do this…

I’d pause a moment (Enter the brontosaurus) and reconsider this phrase: “Teaching information literacy will be relevant only until incoming students have better information literacy skills than our instructional staff.”

Reading between the lines, gentlemen, there’s an easy assumption that this time is near.

As someone who teaches information literacy, I don’t see it improving independently in its skin, and in fact I see very serious flaws in the understanding of our youngest students about how to look, where to look, and what to do. We assume that researchers who are “born digital” – that is, born after 1990, say – are excellent “born digital” scholars, which is a false assumption. We cannot depend on high school teachers to catch them up; we can’t depend on them for grammar or composition, so why depend on them for information literacy?

I agree that librarians need to develop (an active verb) products, in the way that academic scientists and engineers develop products, but development (active noun) requires education for our users as well, and not a simple assumption that our users are skilled because they used to love to play Halo 8 and they have a MySpace page or whatever. And there is serious hubris in dependence on Google Scholar, at this point anyway.

One of the very real values of our physical collections is that we own them, as opposed to Nate’s point that we lease digital products. But development is not a return to a lost role of the librarian. Librarians built collections that we own, yes, and we still do (dinosaurs roam the Earth, my friends). Librarians did not traditionally design the delivery mechanisms for these collections – the discovery tools yes, but delivery, no. The book, the bindery, the microfilm, came from elsewhere. The card catalog, alas, was ours.

Steve implies, I think, that the CIC needs to dedicate funds and – by extension – people-hours to the development of new products, and to do so cooperatively. I think this is a radical new model, not a return to something that “librarians did for centuries.” Maybe I’m off-base here?

I’m curious to know: Is that how LibStats was developed? (By the way, my library is poised to adopt that product! Mazel tov!) Is that how BibApps was developed?

“Reading between the lines, gentlemen, there’s an easy assumption that this time is near.”

Well, I’d say this time *is* near, but I’d say “near” means “within 30 years.” I’m saying that long-term, research is going to get easier, and the role of librarians as “people who are really good at using Engineering Index” won’t continue forever. And we’ll get new high school teachers within 30 years.

My main premise is that librarians *did* design card catalogs, which are very good at what they do within their technological limitations. Discovery tools *are* data. I’m skeptical of the “library as publisher” concept, as libraries haven’t been publishers, and anyhow, there are lots of publishers. However, we can still design and build new and better card catalogs; we just *aren’t*. Well, except for Medline, which I love.

So… physical collections are one thing; I’m more worried that we’re ALSO leasing our discovery tools. Or, more exactly, the data behind our discovery tools.

Libstats and the Bibapp were both essentially built because, well, it was in Wendt’s interest to do so even without larger collaboration.

And… enjoy Libstats!