As an undergraduate I found the university library to be an inexhaustible store of riches. On countless occasions I’d venture to the stacks in search of a particular book and leave with a half-dozen books on similar themes–sometimes, but not always, including what I’d set out to find. This was all thanks to serendipity, the marvels of bibliographic control, and a desire to learn that always exceeded my time and energy.

When I began studying for my MLIS, my hope was to assist people in navigating their own college and university libraries. I wanted to be a guide and helper, hopefully evoking in others a similar love for the library as I had experienced myself. Wandering through the stacks appeared to be the way that people would experience academic libraries forever. So if the librarian could make that journey fruitful, this would be a great success.

This is still true, whether the wandering is through the stacks or through a bevy of online resources. But I’ve come to believe that this is a limited conception of what librarians can do and be. The traditional model is of the librarian as a gatherer of resources and linker of people to those resources. But the reality is that it is easier than ever for people to locate and utilize their own materials, whatever we might think of their quality or authority. Wandering through the stacks continues to decline, and people will find their own routes online.

So rather than being guides to what already exists, we should become facilitators of new work. Librarians of the future will thrive as enablers of what would otherwise not be possible.

What does this mean? Some academic librarians could become publishers, as is already happening but not yet at scale. More ambitiously…librarians could become involved in developing software that assists with data management. The possibilities are endless. The point is to become more active at every step in the scholarly communications chain, not only after something has already been published. This would require learning new skills and otherwise merging identities with members of other professional groups, which is far from an easy assignment. But such readjustment is the key to our continued vitality.

What about the literature, and all the rest of the scholarly communication infrastructure? If librarians are busy facilitating new forms of discourse, who will buy and manage the books and journals? I’d argue that this will continue to be our responsibility, but should decline in relative importance. And we should no longer pay the full cost of traditional forms of scholarship. To the extent that our faculty maintain allegiance to the older models, they should help pay for them.

In sum–our primary goal should be to embrace the Web in all its potentialities, not just as a convenient delivery mechanism for content that would otherwise be printed. Librarians should lead and challenge, not merely serve. In this way we will be change agents and, yes, thought leaders.

Question 2: I wish I knew! It would be great for librarianship if we had a website like Edge (edge.org) where we could gather the most thoughtful writers about librarianship to exchange and debate ideas.

Increasingly, with so much information available in varying electronic or digital formats, and with the information often not in-house, but anywhere in the world, the librarian has become a ‘conversation facilitator’. ‘Mobility’ and ‘convenience’ are now key, and if that means that ‘anytime anywhere’ service, including social networking options, are the most useful for a customer, today’s librarian must inject him/herself into that global conversation. In fact, sometimes it’s the customers taking us there with them, so we must go, or be left behind. Better to arrive ahead of the pack, and start the conversation ourselves!

The idea of ‘Librarian as thought leader’, to me, resurrects the words of Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” His thoughts were ahead of his time, but they suit ours perfectly. The information media have changed, and continue to do so with increasing speed. It’s librarians who are best equipped to navigate this labyrinth responsibly. They’ll weave through the different sources and sift through the information, finding the authoritative answers to satisfy the essence of our queries. And they’ll do this because they believe in the freedom of information, regardless of what form it may take, as they always have.