Quoth Eric Lease Morgan:
>As the amount of content on cube increases the less
>important access will be come and the more important services against
>the content will become. This, in my opinion, is an opportunity for
>librarianship. It is where librarianship can grow and fill a niche.

It seems to me that library-in-a-box poses even more access challenges than
library-online. With online sources, there are lots of competing suppliers
providing access points to all this information. With an iPod style
library, we'd have to have some fantastic retrieval methods.

First, we'd have to be able to accept user input. I expect that'll be a
voice recognition thing.
Then we'd need to be able to do an effective content search across textual,
audio and video sources.
After that, there's the matter of organizing results in such a way that the
user can quickly find the right information.

Leaving size and space considerations aside, we have most of the technology
to do this now. But I think librarian-like folks will have a few roles in
this environment:

1. we'll be working on the systems end to help create meaning from
data-jumbles, just as we do now.
2. people are going to be iPodLibrary-savvy to varying degrees. There will
always be jobs for people who are more skilled than others  at navigating
the knowledge organization systems.

Ken

Ken Irwin                                               [log in to unmask]
Reference/Electronic Resources Librarian        (937) 327-7594
Thomas Library, Wittenberg University