Notes Taken at OU 2008 SLISebration

*As the image suggests, Dr. Andrew Dillon is quite passionate about the present and future of the library and information profession.

The following notes were taken during Dr. Dillon’s lecture, Challenges and Threats. As a pre-comps exercise, I’ve categorized the notes according to the Core Values of Librarianship.

Service:

• The heart of librarianship is maintaining and managing the quality of information services.
• Who are we serving in this world that is coming?
• Library students should be required to perform service in the society that helps improve access to information – supervised by an external mentor (i.e. someone who has no affiliation with the library school).

Diversity:

• This [library and information studies] is a field that’s willing to embrace diversity, but how do we do it?
• The goal should be to have an information world that reflects the way people actually think and reason.
• Cultural shifts are slow but that doesn’t mean they can’t be studied and understood.

Social Responsibility:

• Being well-motivated is never enough. What you have to say has to be achievable.
• Talking only to ourselves is not going to do anything. Library schools should teach students leadership and advocacy.
• Things that change quickly attract our attention and detract us from the underlying slower pace reality that can’t be undone. For example, while we are distracted by the “fashion layer of technology”- the fast-changing layer that detracts from the more permanent changes of technology – scientists share information with each other and bypass the library, and students come to the library for coffee rather than information.
• We must understand the politics, economics, and ethics of librarianship.

Education and Life-Long Learning

• Half of all Americans have broadband access at home. One billion people world-wide use the Internet; by 2015 the number will reach two billion.
• The majority of the world’s population doesn’t have access to the Internet yet but they soon will; and once they do, their influence will weigh heavily on future content and interface.
• 40% of information seekers say the Internet is their primary source; 80% of these Internet information seekers say they check the resources of this information.
• People are not stupid. We might like to think they’re stupid – so we’ll feel superior – but they’re not. Humans [Dr. Dillon detests the term “users”] want to be self-sufficient and they want access anytime, anywhere.

Professionalism:

• The theory is what will guide you when there is no obvious answer. People who can do that are extremely valuable.
• Universities claim they cannot recruit the type of people they need to run the university library.

Preservation:

• Practically all new information is created digitally. Curiously, we are now consuming more paper on this planet than any other time in history.
• Books will outlive us all; if anything, because we know how to preserve them. We haven’t a clue how to preserve anything digital.

Access

• Ever since humans have had more information than they could look at in one go there’s been a need to organize it.
• What makes a library a library is the people who organize it and provide access to it.
• A question that should be asked of all library and information universities upon ALA accreditation: What are you doing to advance the access to information to all users?

Public Good

• Getting an idea out there: think what that did for science; think what that did for society.
• In reference to all the universities that are allowing Google to digitize their collections: It’s in confidence that resources paid for by taxpayers are being given to Google and no one has an answer for it.
• Our culture shouldn’t just be driven by profit.