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Librarians from the Netherlands tour innovative libraries

"Five-Year Information Format Trends, released in early 2003, provides a snapshot look at how trends and innovation in information formats (e.g. Web pages, electronic books, MP3 audio) are creating new challenges and opportunities for librarians, who must integrate these with existing formats and build new information management processes all while balancing resource allocation."

The future will judge academic librarians by how well they were able to build coalitions across institutions and negotiate with publishers to bring digital books into a co-equal status with physical books.

Libraries already act like Google in many ways. Or I should say instead, Google acts like libraries. It is the mission of both to organize the world's information, to make it openly accessible, to find and present the most authoritative (by many definitions) sources, to instill an ethic of information use in the public, to act as a platform for communities of information, to encourage creation. So how could libraries, in turn, think like Google? Some libraries act as platforms for community content creation (one of my first efforts in hyperlocal community journalism, GoSkokie.net, made with the Medill School of Journalism, is now run by the library). In how many ways could a library act as a platform for the community to inform itself by providing tools and training for content creation? How can libraries collect the wisdom of the crowd that is their communities (e.g., creating collaborative town wikis and maps made by the community)? Librarians and their expert patrons could curate the web and create topic pages that would rise in Google search as valuable resources for the world (if your library is in Florida, it could maintain the best collections of sources for information on manatees or sunburns). What I'd really like to do is brainstorm this question with your readers on my blog: How could they be Googlier?

This is a chapter of book from the series "Advances in Library Administration and Organization, Volume 26, pages 71-149. ISSN: 0732-0671. This chapter discusses a study at an academic library in Illinois that looked at how well librarians adapted to changes in formats of information.