Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
The title Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library is so appropriate that I simply had to repeat the Chronicle of Higher Education commentary post. Brian T. Sullivan is an instructional librarian at Alfred University and suggests that the Academic library has died and the autopsy report reveals the following factors that contributed to its death:
- Book collections became obsolete
- Library instruction was no longer necessary.
- Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum.
- Libraries and librarians were subsumed by information-technology departments.
- Reference services disappeared.
- Economics trumped quality.
Sulivan expands on these 6 points in the article. He also offers the following summary statement which is a very hard pill to swallow and even though Sullivan is an instructional librarian I am sure he has angered many of his professional peers:
…it is entirely possible that the life of the academic library could have been spared if the last generation of librarians had spent more time plotting a realistic path to the future and less time chasing outdated trends while mindlessly spouting mantras like “There will always be books and libraries” and “People will always need librarians to show them how to use information.”
PLEASE remember I am simply repeating what this library professional has written about.
