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50 - Libraries and librarians in the Information Age

from Part Eight - Automation Pasts, Electronic Futures: the Digital Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Liz Chapman  and
Frank Webster
Edited by
Alistair Black  and
Peter Hoare
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Summary

A chapter with a title such as ours unavoidably implies a review of the immediate past and a glimpse into the future. The tacit questions concern the major direction of change and the possible role of libraries in the future. Here we will begin by reviewing what we believe to be a popular prospectus. But we will move on to refuse the commonplace assumption that the future holds radically new challenges for libraries, at least from the quarters that are usually suggested. On the contrary, and notwithstanding talk of an Information Society announced by virtuoso information and communications technologies, the Internet especially, we shall suggest that long-established and ongoing developments in the realm of information generation and supply, though they have accelerated in recent decades, pose deeper questions for the role of libraries and librarians than new technologies and evocations of an Information Age.

The Information Society and libraries

In recent years it has become commonplace to suggest that we are now living in an Information Society. Quite what this means is unclear, and scrutiny reveals it to be a dubious and problematical concept. Nevertheless, this has not prevented commentators from presenting the ‘Information Society’ as a new age which is overturning previous ways of life.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland , pp. 639 - 653
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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