Value of skilled humans
Alison Pope at Myndsi turned up an interesting quote about the value of skilled humans from the JHU Gazette in her Bangor librarians face internet threat:
Massive information overload is placing librarians in an ever more important role as human search engines. They are trained and gifted at ferreting out and vetting the key resource material when you need it. Today's technology is spectacular — but it can't always trump a skilled human.
There are plenty of tools out there that can help find and deliver and visualize information in new and fabulous ways. But I am the consumer of that information in the end, and I need to make sense of it according to my context and my needs. Librarians, researchers and good writers help me by applying their expertise and skill to the topic at hand.
Was it Vanover Bush who predicted that we would pay for people's pathfinding through online materials? Maybe it was Ted Nelson, but is was well before information was online. Strange that we still haven't seen how important that really is in the deluge of information that makes up our age.
Librarians also work as "knowledge brokers" for me, connecting me to people who have knowledge I want, or who want the knowledge I have. They become hubs of sorts. (Did anyone ever do a network study on a corporate librarian?)
But that seems quite different from the level of work that most librarians of thirty years ago did. Like everyone else, they are having to rejustify their existence. They have to do something more than simply tend books and periodicals, or even online databases.