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21 December 2007
A sexy future for librarians?
Posted by Richard Wallis at December 21, 2007 01:05 AM
A blog post with the words sexy and librarians in its title has great potential to offend at least someone, but I'm going to try my hardest not to.
I'm pulling the term sexy from someone else and they are using it in the 'excitingly appealing' context, so that should be OK then.
The someone else is Marshall Kirkpatrick writing on Read Write Web. Like all good posts it draws on a couple of themes to make a point. The first theme is about the findability of user generated content on sites like YouTube. If the contributors of content could be helped with its description to make it more findable, those who are excited about non mainstream content in general would be better served.
Theme two, comes from the Talking with Talis podcast I recently recorded with Jon Udell. The whole conversation with Microsoft's Evangelist is interesting, but the specific point Marshall picks up on comes towards the end when I ask him to think about the evolving role of librarians and their help to the rest of the population - listen to Jon's answer - its only 3 minutes:
Marshall then imagines the following scenario:
Imagine a future when you go to the library with a 5 minute video you've just made about last night's Presidential debates and that librarian says to you:
You should upload it to YouTube and tag it with these four tags - two broad and two more specific to existing communities of interest on YouTube and the topic of your video. Then you should embed that video in a blog post along with some text introducing it and linking to some of your favorite posts by other people who have also written today about the Presidential debates. Make sure to send trackbacks to those posts!
Now, I think this is a particularly good video on the topic, so if you're interested I will vote for it on StumbleUpon (as a sexy librarian I have a very powerful account there) and give it a good summary explanation. Any of those are steps you can take that will make your work all the easier for people to discover.
As another Talking with Talis interviewee Peter Morville professes, making things available is all about making them findable. As technology changes the role of librarians maybe Jon & Marshall right and the profession could move towards more directly helping those creating information. That would be a major change in role, but not necessarily in ethos. Some librarians may find that excitingly appealing - or even sexy.
Photo published by Librarian Avenger on flickr.
Technorati Tags: Librarian, Findability, Future, Talis, Jon Udell, Talking with Talis, Podcast
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