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Seth Godin on “The future of the library”

Yep, gotta love Seth:

The future of the library

“The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.”

Read it. Re-post it.

UPDATE: Here is an interview with Seth Godin by Avi Solomon

Stephen

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Posted on: May 16, 2011, 5:17 am Category: Uncategorized

2 Responses

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  1. Sorry I have to disagree. There are parts of his post that I do agree with, but we, librarians, already knew those things, we don’t need Godin for that. As for the other parts, I’ve responded here
    http://librarianbyday.net/2011/05/16/seth-godin-misses-the-point-on-libraries-again/

  2. Ryan Shepard said

    Pretty sick of the “future librarian is a distracted, multitasking hipster” meme. Research and consuming information critically take time, patience, and focus – if we no longer value this as a culture enough to have professions devoted to it, we should be at least be honest enough to say so point blank.