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  • Print publication year: 2006
  • Online publication date: March 2008

50 - Libraries and librarians in the Information Age

from Part Eight - Automation Pasts, Electronic Futures: the Digital Revolution
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Summary
The long-established and ongoing developments in the realm of information generation and supply pose deeper questions for the role of libraries and librarians than new technologies and evocations of an Information Age. The Information Society is frequently equated with the striking expansion of information and communications technologies or, more generally, with 'being digital'. For academic libraries it is proposed that the Information Age means that students and academic researchers will no longer need actually to visit the library. Technological determinism, and the presupposition that societies' evolution might be plotted by changing occupational types, may be challenged by highlighting wider forces in the world today which exercise a major influence on much that is taking place. Librarians were charged with being elitists who were insensitive to their clients' wishes and who took it upon themselves to decide which books should be stocked. The development of e-books is a modern phenomenon with, the publishers hoped, a bright future.

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The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland
  • Online ISBN: 9781139055321
  • Book DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521780971
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