Excerpt:
"Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Wideners collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Googles massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform."
Eric's current comments about his "old" posting:
In a slightly dated LITA-hosted blog posting [1] I addressed this question, and below are snippets from my reply:
1) XML - XML is a sort of modern-day alchemy.
2) Relational databases - Libraries love lists.
3) Indexing - Believe it or not, databases suck as facilitating
search, especially considering today's user expectations
regarding relevance ranking.
4) Web serving - Increasingly people expect to acquire the
information the require for learning, teaching, and research
through a Web browser.
5) Programming/scripting - Finally, you will want to "glue" all
of the above technologies together into a coherent whole.
Please do not be overwhelmed. All of these things can be learned
and practiced on your desktop or home computer. They lend
themselves better to server-class operating systems such a
Unix/Linux, but learning about these operating systems is
challenging in itself and not readily applicable to
librarianship. All you need is the ability to read books, the
desire to learn, and the time to do it.