We zullen hen meer missen dan zij ons…

15 juni 2007

Deze mooie post van John Dupuis van de Steacie Science & Engineering bibliotheek van de York Universiteit in Toronto is beslist de moeite waard.

De post is de afsluiting van een langere reeks artikelen met de titel My Job in 10 years, die ook verzameld in een PDF gedownload kunnen worden.

“Our patrons and the social and technological tidal wave they are riding is what is going to drive us to embrace transformation and change.
[…]

“Some of the transformations will be painful, some will feel natural.”

[…]

“We will have to accept and be at the forefront in changes in scholarly communications patterns. Open access, wikis, blogs, social networks, whatever, we don’t want to be viewed by the new generation of scholars as behind the times. If that happens, we’ll lose credibility. And credibility is going to be very important as we try to forge a place for ourselves in the new world.

So, be an evangelist in your community, be it for blogs or institutional repositories or open access, but we must be at the crest of the wave or we risk going under.

Really, we’ll miss them more than they’ll miss us. Because it’s a lot easier for them to get along without us (even if with some inconvenience and inefficiency — they won’t even recognize the inconvenience) that it will be for us to get along without them.

We need to use this credibility with faculty and students to encourage them to allow us to take part in their instructional activities, to help them teach their students about being scholars in their fields.”

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