Harris: The De-Skilling of Librarians

Well... that was depressing. Harris certainly presented a strong basis for her warning, and I felt her concerns were generally quite valid. I was surprised when I realized that she sounded the warning call in 1992, preceded by others as much as decade before. The last fifteen years have borne out the arc of her warning in numerous ways, though not to the extreme that one might have expected based on this paper.

I was disappointed that the warning call wasn't followed by a call to action. Should library schools change their curricula in some way? Should professional groups focus on education, consciousness-raising, or political advocacy? Rather than lamenting the decline of traditional librarianship, we should do something positive to take the profession in new directions while preserving the core goal of universal, free access to information.