Stephen pointed to 12 Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Fax and CDs.
#7 Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content: The only people who really care about taxonomy and boolean search are librarians, and unfortunately they usually don’t know enough about their employer’s business to know what to do with the esoterica that requires such tools anyway. With luck, they’ll learn the employer’s business and morph into subject matter specialists, producing real research and analysis and adding meaning and value to information. But they won’t need a proprietary library for that. Nor will they have to pay for the content they add value to much longer. “Information is always trying to be free”, as Marshall McLuhan said a half-century ago. And they won’t sell their research and analysis either: They’ll give it to colleagues to use first, and later they’ll give it away to clients to show how smart they (and their employers) are.
So the future includes using
So the future includes using iconic imagery over words and oral storytelling instead of books? Do I need to run out and buy a loin cloth or should I be focusing on sharpening spears?
My Day As A Corporate Librarian
Coincidentally I work in a corporate library. Before I posted this at 7:15am I had actually had already sent one fax and burned a CD (really). As a matter of fact I sent a fax yesterday, and I’ve probably burned a dozen cds and dvds in the past few weeks. If you’re working as a corporate librarian and don’t know the employer’s business you will get fired.
I hate to feed the trolls, but a librarian working in any library that’s even barely competent is a subject matter specialist. If Corporate Libraries are going away it’s not because of the moronic reasons listed in this piece of crap.
wow, you sound out of touch
Although I agree librarians need to be able to add value to their services in a corporate setting, as a member of Special Libraries Association, I see and work with corporate librarians who are integrated into their businesses. Also, librarians do care more about taxonomy, and info scientists and companies that develop web searching, CMS and KM systems recognize that and hire them for their esoteric expertise. Get a grip.
Yikes
There are so many things utterly strange with this that I could begin almost anywhere. Considering that I am considered either an older millennial or a very young Gen-X’er, this chap is writing about how I work. Maybe I am extremely atypical but these big thoughts are just silly.
I am going to try to address this guy’s points.
1. As for hard drive scanning, I have spent three or four days trying to get a representative from the US Department of Homeland Security to speak on the matter. With luck I will have somebody on the next podcast episode to speak. As to putting everything in the cloud, I would imagine this gentleman was not aware of the Amazon S3 outage that killed storage for several sites such as Twitter, Pownce, and drop.io over an extended period of hours. Even if you save something to the cloud, it has to be stored on something somewhere which means all that has happened is you’ve outsourced your hard drive…and nothing more.
2. I must be weird that I have enjoy somewhat reading documents in the Federal Register. The wall of text is fine by me.
3. The term at CNET’s blogs for this is Artie McStrawman.
4. I work in a global context. For me, e-mail is essential. In working across time zones, I am 7 hours behind London and 19 hours behind Auckland. I have to sleep some time and e-mail is sufficiently asynchronous to allow for that. Phone calls are great but are very, very hard to schedule. One tool I use for planning things across several time zones is this tool at timeanddate.com.
5, 6, 7. There is not one neat prescription for this. I don’t think blogs are necessarily the magic answer.
8. No cell data plan in North America is unlimited. This is why I don’t look at deals to get on wireless broadband. The average cap is 5 gigabytes per month. I would unfortunately use that up in a week to two weeks with as intensive as data flow here is.
9, 10. This ignores far too much about how the brain works. Human beings do not acquire and process information in the same way or even necessarily style. One overarching prescription like what these two points brings up the point that not everyone would get the same mileage from this.
11. Granted I no longer have an employer and work for myself but this is strange. From what I have seen, this is 180 degrees out of sync with reality.
12. There is a need to have a notion of place. Having an office to work in allows for a balance between work and home.
As I said, I would love to have this guy’s budget. I could fund some equipment acquisitions to allow for mobile work or maybe be able to afford travel.
________________________
Stephen Michael Kellat, Host, LISTen
PGP KeyID: 899C131F
Yikes may understate it
I wonder whether this guy gets hot well-paid speaking/consulting gigs for this kind of nonsense… (Apparently he’s a doom-cryer in general, so maybe not.)
The last couple paragraphs are noteworthy: Since, clearly, everybody else should or does think and work the way He does, he’d like to claim keyboards are on their way out–and it’s “too obvious” that everything Microsoft makes is on its way out.
And, of course, in the comments we see that the monolithic Millennials, who apparently really do all think and work alike (except for the ones I’ve met), will make all this happen. Because, you know, a new generation completely wipes out all preceding generations…
Did he really mean that?
I had to re-read #2 a couple of times, because all I could think was, “Did he really say what I think he’s saying?” I think Anon 7:12 has it pegged. I somehow associate text with trifling matters like the rise of civilization, scientific progress, etc. — things we apparently won’t miss once we get over the whole text thing and get on with the the real communicating that can only be done with pretty pictures. I also thought it was a little presumptuous that “wall of text” was listed as one of several “tools, technologies and other artifacts of MY GENERATION…” (emphasis added). I suspect a few Mesopotamian cuneiform scribes might dispute that one.
Fantasy
1) HDD – platters yep those are going away. I have a SSD in the computer on which I am writing this. It seems to boot faster as the OS and most of the apps, and docs newer than 90 days on it.
2) Wall of text, please I can’t stand the oversimplification using visuals. I loathe powerpoint type presentations. I want written reports, white papers, green papers, articles, texts, manuscripts; that I can refer to, markup, and keep handy. They may be in electronic or tangible form but they are much more valuable than images – still or moving. I want the written word not some talking head reading to me.
3) Best practices, are indeed that best practices. They are not static but dynamic as technologies and methodologies change. While they may have another name at some point, best practices are not going away.
4) Email will not go away anytime soon. Some of that which was formerly transmitted by email may be transmitted by other electronic media such as SMS, MMS, and IM. There are uses for email, face to face meetings, and distributed technology facilitated meetings such as telesuites, or live meeting. While I personally know of several big pushes for collborative spaces such as corporate blogs and wikis as well as more formalized collaborative tools such as Quickr or Qucikplace. I am not enamored with any of these technologies, but I do see limited use of them.
5) Corporate (or business) websites run the gamut. I work for a Big 4 firm, and I deal with but one niche of the B2C presence, but look at the quality of search on these firms’ sites (new windows)
E&Y,
KPMG,
PwC,
Deloitte
one of them does a good job, some do not. Try a search for JOBS as the author notes is a very common search. It is not a matter of these sites going away, but the people who do a bad job on these sites going away.
6) This is so far off base as to be laughable. My work concentrates on internal firm knowledge sharing. I would love the author to tell me how the face to face sharing of authoratative, internally generated knowledge will be shared cross border in real time in the golobal marketplace.
7) Again this is laughable. Corporate libraries may change delivery models, but their value is well established.
8) Mobile phones will not go away, in fact in many economies they are the primary mode of telecommunication.
9) This is just silly, it is the opposite of his number six. If face to face communication is they key then classrooms will never go away. There are many things that are only taught in person. Do you want to go to a surgeon who learned a new technique from a manufacturers virtual classroom.
10) Again, he wants to have his cake and eat it too. Meetings will never go away, however technological modalities may faciliate participation by distributed team members, however the in person meeting will never die.
11) Job titles, please some people do care about their job title. I care more about what I get paid, but establishing one’s self in the hierarchy is important when others are required to prioritize your requests.
12) Simple fantasy, offices will never go away. There are tremendous administrative functions that simply cannot be accomplished with everyone participating virtually. Where will the post be delivered?
Number 7….
I have just written an article for the special issue of the Journal of Inf Sc to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Information Scientists, now part of CILIP.
Interestingly, the consensus of many of the authors in the special isssue was that Information Science is passé, overtaken by IT events. I think the comment about corporate libraries may be a bit over the top but may not be that far off beam.
Unfortunately, developments in ‘social computing’ and the belief that computers can sort information intelligently without human intervention have created an environment where libraries and librarians are considered as superfluous. It may not actually be true but it is the conception. I find that many of the comments on here sort of consolidate that, defending the role while ignoring the reality.
BTW I have an M.S. in Information Science, obtained way back when Inf Sc was a dirty word amongst librarians, so I am noy in any sense anti…..
Bye, Barry