It can’t be long until the internet can provide everything, and much more, that a brick and mortar library can? Aren’t brick and mortar libraries and librarians pretty much doomed in modernity?
Librarians help you find things and information. Whether it’s at a bricks and mortar building or on the internet, it’s important to not only know what something is, but how much importance to put into the source. They’ll always be a place for librarians.
Bullshit. Books will never be obsolete.
There was an NPR discussion about this last week; here’s the abstract and some links.
Anyhow, the short answer was no, brick & mortar libraries are not necessarily facing doomdom. Most are changing their services though - becoming more community centers, with reading events aimed at children, helping people with online stuff like taxes…there are gasp still many people who don’t have home computers.
I’ve been looking at payscales this week and I wanted to mention that a university a librarian (like a full-on subject specialist libarian) gets paid as much as a professor-- an analogous set of steps.
Depends on the university. At some schools, librarians have faculty status and go through the steps to tenure, with the pay raises (and publishing requirements) to go along with it. Where I work, we don’t have faculty status and are not paid anywhere near what faculty is.
Librarian is not a dead career path - but it is a changing one. Public libraries, as mentioned, are becoming more community centers in many places, but not just community centers). Academic libraries are often becoming “Information Commons” and librarians can often be found teaching classes to students about how to find information, how to evaluate it and how to use it ethically. Go search for “Information Literacy” on Google. If you use the site:.edu limiter, you’ll find many examples of what librarians are doing in the age of the internet to help people learn to deal with all the information that is out there. We can’t just sit behind a reference desk all day and expect people to come to us with questions. We have to do a lot of looking at what people need as far as information and how to get it to them. And for a university like the one I work at, those users are incredibly diverse - from the 18 year old freshman who is very savvy when it comes to technology, to other students (whether 18 or 60) who have never used a computer before - and we have to be able to help all of them.
I second what Lsura said; librarian jobs are changing and expanding and are no longer just about acquiring, classifying, and storing books and directing people to them. School librarians are also the technology mavens who are highly knowledgeable about the Internet, various databases, and other information resources. The MLS programs are aware of the changing world and are training their students accordingly.
Actually, the occupation is facing a huge shortage of qualified people, so those who want to do it for a career may have more options than ever in the coming years.
Oh, yeah right. The occupation is not facing a huge shortage of entry-level professionals in most areas of the country. Took highly qualified me a year to find a full-time job. Don’t believe everything you read in American Libraries!
I did not read this in American Libraries. I read it on msn.com. Excuse me if it was not correct - however, I said
. If it took you a year, you’ve found a job in the present, not the future.
The OP reminds me of this story from 2002 wherein the governor of Washington state decided they didn’t need a state library, and decided to close it to save money. One of the justifications another Washington legislator used for why they didn’t need a state library was that
Caused much hilarity in librarian circles.
As a non-tenure track librarian with faculty status, I second (or fourth or fifth) what Lsura said. Except, luckily for me, my university pays pretty well.
I do have concerns with one thing Rubystreak says though. I’m very worried about MLS programs adapting to today’s world. I’m concerned that information literacy and instruction are being given short shrift in the curriculum. I’m actually getting ready to write an article on this very thing (that is, if I’m not too exhausted by committee work to get off my butt and write it).
Just a note: this information about the “shortage” of librarians due to the large numbers of upcoming retirements has been spouted for about a decade now. Every once in a while, someplace like MSN picks it up as part of a list - and pretty much takes it for fact. If, in fact, MSN has librarians working for them who listen to anything other than the ALA party line, they’d learn that the huge number of openings that’s been predicted for years hasn’t happened yet. Possibly because of the low salaries, librarians aren’t retiring in the numbers that have been predicted. And, when they do retire, libraries are either not replacing them or are trying to bring in people in the upper ranks, not promoting someone and then hiring a recent graduate. I know lots of people who came into the profession because they read this same type of comment several years ago.
Instruction is not being given the time it should in library schools - I graduated in 2004, and the “instruction” class I took was a load of theory on instructional design. Luckily, the school I attended changed instructors the next time they offered that class (probably due in part to most of a class giving very poor evaluations and several of us having long discussions with the director).
My coworkers and I have had discussions lately about this problem - I think an article would be fascinating to read. If you decide you need a co-author, let me know (half kidding - I know people who prefer not to have co-authors). I’m all of about an hour away from Pittsburgh.
From what I know from my librarian friends, the only areas experiencing much in the way of demand are corporate librarians. In public libraries in the cities, it can be pretty hard to get a job. Everyone and their dog wants to be a children’s librarian in a public library in a glamourous city, and basically someone has to die in order for these positions to open up.
A few years ago I applied for a job at a local library…not as a librarian, but as a clerk…it paid $3.00 more per hour than I was making in retail management…and attended one of four testing sessions. There were easily 120 people at the session I attended, all applying for the one position. So figure the other three sessions were as packed…that’s nearly 500 people applying for the job. The entire posting/testing/hiring process took weeks, nay, months. For an entry-level, no library skills needed job. That seems like an incredibly cumbersome way to fill a job, but being a county agency they have so many rules to follow. And I never found out if I even passed the tests. No feedback whatsoever. And if you wanted to apply for more than one position, you had to take the same test over again for the second position…they wouldn’t just look at how you’d scored on the first test.
My friend is going to school to be a librarian. His goal is to work as a music librarian. A lot of his classes revolve around digitalizing records. I think his first masters thesis was on music catalog digitizalization. Seems like having a specialization is the way to go.
Even if the world is turning digital, there still needs to be qualified people to create the digital catalogs. And there still needs to be people to properly care for all of the aging media. And there still needs to be people to tell all the other people how to use the digital stuff 
This is one of those “the essence of everything you need to know- all the rest is commentary” sentences.
But I’ll comment.
Librarians are becoming far more service professionals. I personally taught two dozen one hour instruction sessions last month to college freshmen who all left realizing that they really don’t know quite as much as they thought they did about how to find information, and the thing I most stress to them in these sessions (Rather than what buttons do I push) is “DON’T EVER WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE TO DO YOUR RESEARCH” (I actually make the class repeat this aloud— in harmony) because that’s when students realize that there’s simply too damned much there to know how to find any thing (the Borges Library of Babel problem). I also show them how easy it is to edit Wikipedia (I’ll type an absurd claim into some entry then immediately go back and delete it) and I’ll show them things like MartinLutherKing dot org (feel free to look at it, it’s work safe as long as people don’t read it, but you’ll understand why I don’t link SDMB to it when you see it) which comes up anywhere from entry number 1 to entry number 4 on Google but is in fact owned and maintained by stormfront dot org (a neoNazi organization). Wiki & MLK dot ORG are two things that demonstrate the total unknown quantity of information from the Internet.
Also, most books are not now and never will be digitized (it’s a money issue purely and simply) and books are still the gold standard of information. As for articles, it is true that even I use online articles first when doing research, but
1- most students have never heard of Interlibrary Loan (which I explain to them) and are unaware that if the article’s not online it’s not a dead end
2- most students don’t really know the difference in scholarly and popular articles
3- most students, when they have 300 databases to choose from, really don’t know where the hell to turn to if they can’t find their info
4- there are a lot more students who are closet info-tech illiterates than you’d think
So anyway, I could go on and on and on but ironically I have to go to work. It’s a very valid and reasonable question but, no, there will always be librarians. We’re playing a more service oriented, info-daemon type role than we once did, but business is actually booming (albeit a lot later in the semester than once it did for academic libraries as students realize a bit late that finding a reliable article on schizophrenia twin studies is a bit more difficult than finding someone in Facebook).
More later if thread survives.
I’m thinking (well, planning, really) to get my MLS in a couple of years, when the kidlings are older, looking to go into the specialized world of law librarians, either academic or firm, depending on the money (I have a JD and I’ve been in legal publishing for more than 15 years). So y’all are saying that the future is still bright? I don’t have to worry about attorneys or law students getting so good at Lexis or Westlaw that they won’t need me anymore? [Well, maybe not lawyers. Most lawyers I know couldn’t find their way around Lexis with a law librarian holding their mouse. Students are probably more savvy.]
Don’t count on students being more savvy! You might think so, but you might be surprised. When I was working at the university’s business library, I figured the college students wouldn’t need any help with, you know, basic web searches. And I figured that once I showed them the basic and advanced search boxes on our databases, they’d take it from there. In truth, these kids were the most search-illiterate people I’ve ever seen. And that was before I went into public libraries. Oh yeah, have I got job security.