Driving into work today I was listening to this week’s TWiT. Om Malik was saying that much like the railroads, newspapers failed to recognize in which business they are actually engaged. At this point, it dawned on me that academic libraries are making much the same mistake. For years, if we thought of these types of questions at all, we would have thought that we are in the collection building and archiving business. We selected materials, managed the collections comprised of those materials and provided access to those materials to our patrons. With the rise of the Internet, many began to see our role is this process as antiquated. After all, “everything is online,” isn’t it? Every year, the Ithaca survey tells us that an increasing number of faculty no longer see the library as an integral part of academic institutions because “everything is online.” While most things are in fact online these days, I don’t believe that this fact reduces the importance of academic librarians. This is because we are not in the archiving business, but rather in the authoritative information business. When a student needs scholarly information for use in a class project, Google largely fails because it does not differentiate between credible and non-credible sources. Our role in the educational process will increasingly become educating students on how to recognize credible sources in the sea of information in which they live. If this is in fact our business, we can survive the transition to the book-less library. We can thrive even in the face of the death of the commercial journal. What we have to do is to accept the change, advertise our educational mission, and to shift our collection development focus from selecting materials to highlighting good sources for credible information. We have to educate students on how to evaluate the authoritativeness of authors of online texts instead of telling them to avoid born-digital resources altogether. In other words, to evaluate the source and author instead of the medium. Contrary to the beliefs of many faculty and administrators, the millennials have little idea of how to do this but we do. And this is our business.
