Librarians

This weeks thread dealt with Librarians.  Again the text has hammered the idea that librarians are proactive agents rather than passive workers.  It is becoming increasingly apparent that the role of librarians has expanded and that expansion is necessary for the field to thrive.  The Salzburg Curriculum lays out a lot of interesting points about what is the objective of librarians.  I did disagree with a few of the points, but overall I got a lot out of this chapter.

One of the things that I disagree with is the idea that libraries must start to move away from collections.  I believe I disagree with this point because I'm hoping to work in an archive with this degree.  While archivist and librarians are two different professions, I don't see a lot of correlation with New Librarianship and archives.  Archives are extremely artifact based and the community they serve is much more selective.  I am not far enough in my education to put forth a sound argument on this topic, but I am curious to know about how librarians and archivist see each others profession respectively.

A thing that I strongly agreed with in the text was the idea that librarians need to be involved on the internet.  I personally have been using the online librarians that the university provides, whether it is an SU librarian or a reference library from a different state.  I did not know about this service until I became a library student, but I found that the service is extremely helpful.  While the answers I get from the online librarian aren't always the best, they still serve as a great resource to finding information.

One more thing that I thought was interesting from the text was the two pictures of the Music Reading Room.  It is apparent that the collection of artifacts from a 50 year period had become so large that the library space itself seemed to suffer.  I understand that artifacts are only a small part of what librarians do and there does need to be a movement that allows for collection in libraries but, does not take up the whole library space.