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Librarians feel compelled to acquire eContent from only one distributor because it is too confusing – for them, for students, for teachers, for business managers - to purchase eContent from a variety of distributors, thus materials selection is driven by who they buy from, not what a

igns with the curriculum. This is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.

It is our job to develop our collections, aligning them with our school/district’s curriculum – not to buy ready-made packages from vendors.  It is our job to create, instructional materials, and to determine how to best assess our students’ learning.  This requires granular knowledge of our patron base, our curricula, and our collections. You can't fake this. It takes a long time to build that knowledge base. If we relinquish these responsibilities to commercial interests, we literally sell out our own profession.

Buffy Hamilton, who calls herself “The Unquiet Librarian,” holds the phone receiver away from her ear at Creekview High School library in Canton, Ga., revealing a cacophony of noise in the background.

Creekview High School’s media center looks and sounds nothing like the silent libraries of the past. The new emphasis on collaborative learning and the use of digital tools to produce dynamic research projects lead to a louder, more hands-on environment that can prove beneficial to students later on in college. Hamilton says graduates have returned to thank her because their digital skills are more advanced than those of their classmate

The shift to a noisier and more interactive library model is relatively new in U.S. public school systems. Some examples are evident at universities and private schools in Georgia, New York and California, all of which have taken a lead in transforming their libraries. In Massachusetts, the Cushing Academy, a private boarding school for high-school students, gave away its collection of over 20,000 books two years ago and transformed its library into a digital center with e-books and searchable databases.

One view is that libraries need to be about a lot more than books. Kids are actually reading more than they used to; it’s just more than books—Web sites and online gaming, for example.

I predict that the future is going to be fewer libraries and more librarians. The facility is transitioning from places where librarians do their work and to places where communities meet and gather. The physical space is simply where the librarians sit. The electronic medium is where they can research and read.

We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting.

So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.

Judgement-based filtering is what people do.