[toomuchtodo]

First, thanks for being a librarian.

Second, I don't think traditional librarians know how quickly the end is coming. Libraries will still exist of course, possibly as makerspaces, possibly as community centers, but with collections like "Library Genesis" [+] and storage continually to plummet in price, in the next 5 years entire libraries could be carried in your pocket.

EDIT: I'm not saying librarians aren't necessary! Quite the contrary! I believe their roles are going to shift to be advisors and guides. I'm saying the idea of the library as a place to go get knowledge itself is going to tail off, since its available over the Internet Firehose.

[+] "Library Genesis is an online repository with over a million of user-contributed books and is the first project in history to offer everyone on the Internet free download of its entire book collection (as of this writing, about 15 Tb of data), together with the all metadata and code for webpages. The most popular earlier repositories, such as Gigapedia (later Library.nu), handled their upload and maintenance costs by selling advertising space to the pornographic and gambling industries. Legal action was initiated against them, and they were closed. News of the termination of Gigapedia/Library.nu strongly resonated in academic and book lovers’ circles and was even noted in the mainstream Internet media, just like other major world events. The decision by Library Genesis to share its resources has resulted in a network of identical sites (so-called mirrors) through the development of an entire range of Net services of metadata exchange and catalog maintenance, thus ensuring an exceptionally resistant survival architecture."

[Sanddancer]

A librarian's always been an adviser and guide. Curation is a huge part of what a librarian's task is. Librarians are also detectives, tasked with finding those obscure resources where you know of them, but not where to find them. There are times, for example, where one needs a specific edition of a book. A librarian would have a much better grasp of how to find that than a search engine.

We've got the resources now to put libraries in our pocket. Phones, tablets, etc can do so easily. At the same time, a library is more than the sum of its books, and needs more than just metadata to properly operate.

[toomuchtodo]

> There are times, for example, where one needs a specific edition of a book. A librarian would have a much better grasp of how to find that than a search engine.

You know, I might have agreed with you before. But after watching the Vanity Fair interview with Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and Sam talking about how no one person really understands how Google's first page results are created anymore, or how machine learning is matching people on dating sites (and those people are having babies, determined by machine learning), I think we're approaching an inflection point where algorithms will be able to provide that guidance.

We're not there yet, I agree with that. But we're closing fast on that future.

[baldfat]

In my opinions librarians are actually needed more now!

Yes we have a fire hose of content and people need people like librarians to help utilize that fire hose more.

When I left (I quit the job) being a librarian in 2008 more than 50% of librarians had lost their jobs in the next 2 years. Most people who handle budgets have your same idea.

My school district of 19,000 students had ONE librarian for all the elementary schools. CRAZY

[dingaling]

> people need people like librarians to help utilize that fire hose more

Given the explosion of niche interests over the past 50 years I don't think its feasible for librarians to provide that service except at extremes of the spectrum: internal university or corporate information of extreme specificity and controlled scope at one end, and public topics of general specificity at the other.

In the middle is a vast information space traditionally only explored and indexed by clubs and societies but now predominantly by the search engines.

Think about asking your local public librarian about functional programming, or the history of turbine-powered cars. They'll have to refer to a index of recommended texts[0] and hope there's something vaguely similar there, which is far inferior to a search engine which can access vast reservoirs of specialist discussion on such specific topics.

[0] I can't remember the name of this index after all this time but it lists 'go-to' references for a long list of topics.

[Bjartr]

> the explosion of niche interests over the past 50 years

Would you mind explaining what you mean here in a little more detail. I'm curious to learn more about this.

[cbr]

> Yes we have a fire hose of content and people need people > like librarians to help utilize that fire hose more.

Or we need to get better at automating the process of helping people find what they're looking for. That is, keep improving search engines.

[intopieces]

I agree with you about the end, but not that traditional librarians aren't aware of it. Because of their tenuous funding source, librarians have become masters at adaptation. They meet constantly to re-evaluate their goals and their place in the community. They are vitally important, especially to those with limited access to technology (homeless, working poor). I do see them evolving further as community centers and that's a good thing.