Kathy Gould at The Palos Verdes Library District blog has a very interesting post (which I’m proud to say was kicked off by something in my book) on the role of librarians as catalogs are enabled to sort themselves based on why someone is searching for something. The post grew out of a conversation with Betth Jefferson at Bibliocommons.

“So what happens when this role of helping people find the information that meets their particular needs is transferred from the librarian to the user community at large?” Kathy asks. The answer she gives presents librarians as creators and maintainers of the systems (an information architecture role, as I’d call it), as guides to and through the system, as voices in the system, and as facilitators of the library’s role in the community. But she puts it better than I just did.

Sounds right to me. [Tags: ]