Libraries are always under pressure it seems, but we do prevail. We will always be challenged to make our case for how we contribute to our organizations. Special libraries in particular are going to look different in the years to come. As management looks for staff and space savings, users want their information on their desktop, and more and more information is available electronically, special library physical collections will become very scarce.
Technical service staff will need to translate their skills to become document and records managers. Organizations are already struggling to understand the implications of e-chaos. Information professionals are needed to create the taxonomies, build consistent authority files for vendor names and personal names, associate content to geographic information systems, add metadata to content, and enable organizations to find the information that is now stored in e-mail and on hard and shared drives. We will need to help our organizations deal with the challenges of global information and global partners.
Information professionals will continue to negotiate the selection and purchase of information resources, teach information literacy, train staff to use Web tools, identify and report on competitive intelligence, and do many of the things we do today. If we are able to help our organizations see how they can leverage archival collections, we will continue to manage them, but those collections will increasingly become digital, because of both the cost of physical storage and the ways people want to interact with the content.
As John Cotton Dana told us more than 100 years ago, libraries and librarians that stay closely aligned to the business goals of their organization, anticipating our changing roles to enable our organizations thrive, will thrive along with their organization.
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