Dentistry world vs

Library world

The educational-university point of view for new challenges and opportunities

Cristóbal Urbano

The core of knowledge vs the instruments of intervention

Challenges: crisis in image and identity?

• What is "library world"? Janny, is it accidental your omission of "information"? (Dutch Association of Librarians and Information Professionals)

• The dissolution in a broader and shapeless world is a challenge, but our self reduction (exclusion?) to "libraries recognized by ordinary people only as our physical place" is as well a challenge (this give us a clear identity but not in a forefront world).

• Without "professional/academic sex-appeal" it's is hard to attract the bests new comers (students, researchers, investors, politicians,...) and that is vital for stand and improve our resources and services

Challenges: crisis in image and identity?

• And last, but not least, maybe the greater challenge is to practice some kind of "transvestism" in order to hide an important facet of our identity: we have to be very proud as well of the future of our work in libraries as a places! So that here you are, this is the challenge: to throw out the baby [the libraries/the librarians] with the bath water

Oportunities: a more value-added work?

• Our present-future maybe it's less confortable, but it's more interesting living now and here.

• We can now work less time in ancillary duties, and add more value to the documents we mediate, and we have time to the digital treatment of new materials that formerly were not offered to the users (local collections, for instance), this can attract new comers from graduate fields others that LIS.

• If we open "our world" -- keeping care of our values, but without some pieces of the furniture we have in "our world"-- we can match-join people coming from other academic and professional traditions that pursue similar goals for society (at the end serving people, building services-resources-artifacts to do the mediation between producers and readers-users is our identity).

Oportunities: a more value-added work?

• Do we need social acknowledgement? Yes, and now we have more scenarios to play our values, and our professionalism and competences sharing projects with other professionals. This is an opportunity!