After reading the Uni of Sydney article http://tinyurl.com/43qawfw
as well as the link provided to the Uni of NSW article about changes and job cuts in tertiary libraries and a number of responses
http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/bring-me-the-head-of-seth-godin/ to the recent Seth Godin article, I have these thoughts.
To me the library should be less a place for passing on knowledge and more a place to access, share and create information and ideas.
The first hints at a place of passivity, a shhh kind of place, an archive, a last century place and one that I'm not surprised in the current (lack of) funding age is crumbling.
The second hints at a place of collaboration, ideas and engagement and dare I say fun, a hub, a 21st century place. A cafe in such a place doesn't seem at all out of place to me. It sounds kind of enticing.
Let's make the library the go to place not just to get info but to link info with ideas. In the age of social networking why does encouraging face to face social networking in the library, with information easily accessible, and other people to share it with,
rework it and use it to create something new, sound unappealing.
Providing and managing the collection is no longer enough - Librarians need to engage users with the collection.
Of course users would rather access journals online - it's quicker and easier. At some point print copies that are not used anymore are wasting space. Just because they've always been there is no good reason why they should always stay there.
The articles don't explain why less print copies and more online access leads to such large job cuts. If the print copies were hardly used, the management of them should have been minimal.
Is any change just a good excuse for the above mentioned (lack of) funding age to yield its whip?
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