Every now and then, usually when I have a moment by myself, I think about the state of librarianship. I ponder the opportunities, the problems, and the progress. Generally, these periodic, informal "state of librarianship" addresses to myself are optimistic.
Over the past couple of decades, rather than concentrate on outright threats to librarianship, I have tended to focus on things that are holding librarianship back, or retarding its growth and development. Questions of momentum, acceleration, and deceleration are much more mundanely interesting than questions about the life and death of a profession. Although Google is doing some interesting and large-scale things to make information findable and usable, and thus seems like it poses something of a threat to librarians, we really cannot do much about what Google does or plans to do.
By concentrating on the retarding factors, perhaps we can identify tangible problems that we can work to solve.
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