A Generational Gap Debunked

Either I'm catching up or ignorance is bliss:)

I'm ending my day with my response to my Db posting on the changing roles of librarians which required me to read my classmate's postings first. Here is my response in the long form. It's over the word limit so I have to cut it, but this is what I want to say:


I am so surprised at the mixed impressions of what librarians currently do and what they will do in the future. As a professional I can tell you that the generational references are inaccurate and in a business settling could have resulted in collateral damage to your career. I’m not sure of the relevance of a new generations growing up with computers when the generation to which you are referencing to as out of date invented those computers and applications and contributed to the content you currently use. To those who think librarians are out of date, I would suggest you consider the librarians that are teaching us
Speaking for myself, I’ve been using a computer professionally since 1992, actually it was a Mac, for work and pleasure. I acquired and maintained my computer skills in an ever changing environment as well as contributed content to early searchable databases as they were being built. I’ve also worked in a profession that requires me to be current with those skills and able to do research which leads me to my second point, high quality research can not be done from your bedroom-everything is not on the internet!


When your job requires research it needs to be complete and performed efficiently and timely. Following on my theme from the first posting, finding relevant information efficiently on the internet is an illusion for all but the simplist searches. This is why we need librarians. There is no time to sort through the gazillion postings retrieved in a internet/database search plus the paper publications. Let me provide an example, in a business setting, the Scopus search we did for “open source” would have required a review of each cited work retrieved so that only RELEVANT references to the full topic were referenced and saved. Life is not a college exercise and librarians are not limited to helping undergraduates.



With that said...Good night.