Is the role of the librarian becoming obsolete

Exactly.
Librarians will not become obsolete due to the Internet. What may make jobs harder to find for them, however, are library administrators who don’t want to pay decent salaries to professional librarians and impress city managers and mayors with doing everything on the cheap (like paying a professional 30k per year is an astronomical salary!); and a public that “loves libraries” but does not love the underpaid and overworked people who toil in them.

Just because a library system does not have professional librarians, or enough professional staff does not mean librarians are obsolete.

What this portends for the future of the profession , I have yet to decide. I left the field myself, and don’t intend to go back anytime soon.

Re:librarians obsolete?!
Dear Anonymous Patron:

I get your point, but just wanted to say thanks for answering this person’s question in such a warm, welcoming way. She’s new to the profession – and this may be her first venture into a discussion zone of this sort – and thanks to you she’ll probably never be back. How dare you answer so rudely. Oh – and please tell us what study you have access to that shows a correlation between the growth of the Internet and the demand for librarians – or are you just making that up?

And to the original poster – librarians will only be made obsolete by other information providers if we allow ourselves to be made obsolete. It’s imperative that we know the competition, know how it works, know its weaknesses – and know how we’re better – and we can need to be able to explain it all to our user base in an easily digestible, sound-bite like explanation. Welcome to the profession – and yes, most of our are pretty nice folks – with some exceptions.

Yes, nice people like you!
First of all, keep your balls on. No need to bust a gasket just because I posted something you don’t agree with. I hope you don’t act like that to patrons who ask you questions you don’t like, or state things you happen to disagree with, or librarians really will become obsolete.

I said librarians will NOT become obsolete…and are needed. However, like it or not, there is a segment of “the profession” , sadly, some fellow librarians who are also administrators, who try to show non-librarians (mayors and city managers) that they can run libraries without professional librarians. Is it wrong? Is it shortchanging the public to do so? Yes, it most certainly is, but it is a facet of the profession that all librarians should know about and address, new or old or in-between. Lack of librarian postions does not mean librarians are not needed.

It needs to be addressed and fought. Just so you know, I HAVE fought to make clear to powers that be how important it is for patrons to have professional librarians at reference desks, and how hiring a para does not save money in the long run. This was at two places whose administrators were told that paying an MLS-holding librarian, and another librarian with a second Master’s degree, $27,000.00 per year was too much money! And I caught a lot of flak over it, as did some of my co-workers who were also concerned about desk service to both children and adults. Since the jobs were seen as female-oriented jobs that “anyone could do”, or where “you just sit around reading and stamping out books”, why go for MLS holders? One library was putting teenaged pages in the children’s department because they would not hire a children’s librarian. I suppose they thought that reference service to children, by a qualified and trained children’s librarian, was also too expensive and not needed. Would the kids know any better? It is a sad state of affairs when librarians and their patrons are so devalued.

So, as I stated in my first post, just because it SEEMS that librarians are old-style, they are not. Unless librarians address this problem of “do more with less”, it does seem that we may become extinct if we seem to be too expensive at the pittance most public librarians are paid at currently. More than once I have seen professional librarian positions, once vacated, unfilled or replaced with a non-MLS worker, who frankly, was being exploited at being paid $16,000.00 per year and expected to know what a librarian knows and be able to perform as a librarian did.

To the original poster-also consider special-library postitions… they pay better and you are usually seen as a valued member of the team, a professional, and you will get more respect all around.

To the ballistic poster-you must be very fortunate that you work in a library where you have not experienced any of this.