Manifesto of a 21st Century Librarian

Soviet printed stationery 1962

Originally uploaded by sludgegulper

Readers,

Other than the new design and format of The Dean Files, I have been working on a document titled "Manifesto of a 21st Century Librarian," a document which contains a set of talking points about the key topics and trends in librarianship in the 21st century. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

From the great ancient library of Alexandria, where the first librarians organized information according to their classification scheme to improve access to their almost countless stacks of scrolls, to librarians generating metadata for digital objects to assist their users in finding the information they seek, the librarian has always been focused on the user - this is what differentiates our profession from glorified hall monitors. However, over the past 200 years, the general public has associated our profession not with our unique skills, but with the information objects our workplaces usually hold, be they books or electronic objects.

Interested in contributing (you don't have to be a librarian, I promise) to this? Let me know in the comments!