by Deb Hunt, Candidate for SLA President-Elect, San Francisco Bay Region and Silicon Valley Chapters, IT, KM and Leadership & Management Divisions

Trends related to LIS employment show that in 2007, 15% of employers were not libraries and  in 2008, that number jumped to 27%.  In this same study, an analysis of emerging jobs outside of libraries shows a wide variety of titles: emerging technologies librarian, usability analyst, information architect, and more. With these types of titles in mind, the skills required and requested by employers continue to expand and change, including taxonomy creation, knowledge of metadata standards, etc.

As Stephen Abram noted (and I’m paraphrasing here): “LIS skills are good currency, but only for those with the flexibility and insight to exploit the opportunities. “

We must add flexibility, insight, and recognition of opportunity to our essential core skills! We need to move outside our comfort zone and reflect on our accomplishments so we can communicate them to current, future and prospective employers or clients. Else, how will they know what we can do and what we bring to the table?

Career sustainability (my candidacy theme) is about growing in our jobs now and in future jobs as we continue to deepen our expertise and experience. (Please join the Career Sustainability LinkedIn group.)

Many LIS jobs are not coming back or are coming back in a whole different way. We need to be resilient taking our skills with us no matter where we go. I believe that we have much potential and energy to move forward to career sustainability.

I’m passionate about what I do and what we can do as a profession. Together we can create a more healthy and sustainable future as we grow our skillset and shout from the rooftops the value that we bring to our employers, potential employers and clients.

Deb Hunt is Principal of Information Edge which empowers clients to find the information they need to do their work. Information Edge specializes in enterprise content management, knowledge services, professional research, and library design and automation.

Deb has been a member of SLA since 1986 and is a candidate for SLA President-Elect. She served on the SLA Board as a Director from 2008-2010 and is the creator and team leader of SLA’s 23 Things. She is a past President of the San Francisco Bay Region Chapter and a member of the Silicon Valley chapter and the Library Management, KM, and IT divisions. She is an active member in the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) and served on its Board of Directors from 2001-2003.

Background story:  Two days ago, Arik Johnson a member of the crack FutureReady365 team, alerted me that Seth Godin—marketing guru extraordinaire and SLA conference keynoter in 2008—had a riveting post on the future of libraries that would be highly relevant to the future ready conversation. I contacted Seth at 2:56pm to request to cross-post. Seth respond at 3:01pm with this imperative: Go, go, go! So, at the speed of Future Ready, here you GO!

Cindy Romaine

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn’t have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books  got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you’ve seen and what you’re likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don’t shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won’t unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it’s not that the mall won, it’s that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don’t say I’m anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I’ve demonstrated my pro-book chops. I’m not saying I want paper to go away, I’m merely describing what’s inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now (most of the time), the insight and leverage is going to come from being fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user serviceable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousand things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

SETH GODIN has written thirteen books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. Every one has been a bestseller. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.