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Live blogging again. As you might imagine, I’m particularly interested in this as a recent MLIS grad…

The Future of Library Education
José-Marie Griffiths, Dean of SILS at UNC-Ch

• Future is bright due to explosion in information availability and technology.
• Discussed that online does not replace physical use of information, in fact, most use both physical and online (with the exception of college students).
• More types of data: text, data sets, images, scans, and they need to be pulled together for most usefulness.
• Librarian’s skills of organizing, synthesizing, indexing, etc, become very critical.
• “We are going to have to change the way we’re doing things” as individuals, institutions, collaborators, in order to achieve what we need to be doing to stay current and relevant and best use our skills.
• Recommends thinking about “possible futures” and what we can do that would be useful in the most different situations: all will need more info seeking skills, will be collaborating quickly and remotely, and “knowledge literacy” will be the new currency.
• “Knowledge literacy” seemed to be the people who know the right information at the right time.
• Roles of Knowledge Professional: knowledge of users we serve, knowledge of recorded knowledge domains.
• From collection development to “knowledge prospector,” finding nuggets that contribute to collection domain on the web (validating collections of digital materials, relationship of digital materials to validated non-digital materials).
• Classifiers, catalogers, indexers to metadata developers and “guidebook publishers” that provide tools that contain intellectual content, structural, procedural information.
• Information retrieval to knowledge navigators, knowing about different finding tools, identify more useful, relevant materials quickly, and pioneering new knowledge frontiers.
• Reference to information analysts/knowledge interpreters, helping users extract and interpret information, and close to users for context and analysis understanding.
• She described residency rounds in a hospital where a librarian went with students, listening to conversation. Librarian left session, did searches on the topics of conversation, and brought back relevant materials. What would this look like in a classroom? This, to me, would be more intense and time consuming than the “traditional” embedded librarian role, but still an interesting prospect.
• Working on a “Future of Library Workforce” study to determine the nature of the anticipated librarian shortage.
• Talked about the UNC School of Information and Library Science.
• UNC has a BS in LIS as well as the MLS and PhD. There’s a lot of overlap.
• Several specializations through certificates and dual programs.
• UNC investigating a significant growth plan.
• When they build, they’ll also build in Second Life so that folks can see how it’ll look.

Update: Somehow some really weird spam got added to this post. I just deleted it and am emailing Kevin. (In the case that you saw it and were wondering why there were spam links in the post.)