This made me think: I’m all in support of Google’s book digitization project, but… um… do we have any plan whatsoever for when our physical collection completely loses relevance? More to the point, if the entire function of libraries becomes that of collection managers (read: people who sign great huge checks to cartels of publishers)… well, how many librarians do we really need on campus, then?

Research is getting easier all the time — I know serious researchers that use Google Scholar almost exclusively… to very good effect. Teaching information literacy will be relevant only until incoming students have better information literacy skills than our instructional staff.

Anyone want to take bets on when that’ll happen?

Part of the answer, as demonstrated at this conference, is to take the power back. We need to start building things; we need to find new, better ways for customers to find information. Remember — librarians did this for centuries, until computers came along and scared everyone. Google isn’t the only company that can build a good search engine. And a concerted effort by a few institutions could take any of the commercial ILS vendors sitting down, as the Evergreen folk have shown.

We can do this. We need to totally change what we’re up to.

For example, I just recently wrote an article with a colleage (have not heard about acceptance/rejection). We used Writeboard as a collaborative authoring tool. It produces an RSS feed for monitoring when someone updates the work. I could imagine combining this with a stream from a service like the Refworks citation manager. Pulling these feeds together with a citation database’s RSS or alert service feed the way Keith pulled together feeds from his iTunes, blogs, flickr, etc would provide an interesting picture of a person’s research activities.

Also interesting is mention of another topic we debated, Wikipedia. The article cites a grass roots effort by grad students to put good information into the open encyclopedia.

Higher education is fighting back. Librarians are teaching “information literacy” and establishing alternative Web indexes. Graduate students, in the front lines as teaching assistants, are starting to discuss joining Wikipedia rather than fighting it, as many instructors still, quixotically, do.

Seeking real good information on the internet (school stuff for example) is still very hard. If you try to find some good information about aerodynamics, it’s your day-job. I have been searching for hours, and the only things I found were things I already knew. The idea of the internet being one big library maybe there, but finding scientific information is a pain in the ass. Luckily there’s still an old-fashioned library with books and stuff, so I have been able to find what I was looking for. The internet really needs to grow a lot before it can take the role of being a really good “info-dealer.”