Reiteration: Skills for our digital world

In our digital world, e-resource publishing is increasingly the norm in the Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Print-based technical service activities for mainstream print publications (not special collections materials) are already decreasing. Digital publications have been increasing and will continue to increase. An increasing number of new reference sources will be available in electronic format only. Cross-vendor tools for the organization and management of e-resources are emerging (e.g. Elsevier, Ebscohost Discovery Service, Summon, Google Scholar, etc). Vendors are supplying catalog records (brief records for acquisitions; full records for e-resources via services like MARCit! and Serials Solutions)

Libraries will increasingly seek to enter partnerships with other libraries and organizations, creating collaborative collection agreements. Archival material will increasingly come to us in digital format because that is how it is being created, stored and managed. Our special collections will continue to acquire unique material, much of which (but not all) will likely continue to be non-electronic.

Within a generation we will have born digital scholars. They’ll have grown up with, and done their research in a digital environment.

The library will have fewer staff. This staff will need a different mix of skills than our current staff has. Cataloging staff will use traditional cataloging skills less than the new skills needed in the digital dominant environment. We need people with an understanding of digital structure, different metadata schema, various digital formats, and the underlying architecture of various databases. We need people who understand the basic languages and structures of digital systems (RDF, XML, PHP, JAVA, etc.), and the possibilities and opportunities they present. We need managers who are able to conceptualize, plan, and carry out Collection Services projects.

We also need more people with foreign language skills to work with the growing number of multi-lingual e-resources. Knowledge of more than one language has become more critical than ever for discovery of and access to information in this new environment.

While it is true that we will need to continue managing our mainstream print collections (cataloging new material from not-yet-digital areas, clearing backlogs, record cleanup, preservation, storage), these tasks will eventually stabilize and decrease over time. Eventually we could even see shared depositories with staff who would take over the management of these materials and metadata from the originating libraries.