Librarians once were futurists. Our everyday activities hinged on a set
of practices and theories directed toward known, although distant, outcomes.
What was the term of our mandate to provide access to the cultural
heritage in our trust? Essentially forever. We included new media formats
as a matter of course, with necessary preservation, conservation, curation,
and archiving. Many and multivaried constraints strained our knowledge
industries, yet our vision embraced unprecedented growth in creation,
acquisition, collection, indexing, digesting, abstracting, finding, delivery,
and research. Our group intellectual capacity accommodated complexities
of kind, scope, identity, and audience. We could budget, plan, and
serve despite limitations on funding, cooperation, and support. Librarians
understood one another globally, even as libraries became known as
repositories of things rather than as organizations of people. Something happened along the way to the future: in sustaining our status of authority, we
became ubiquitous, and in our passion to extol our mindset, we became
universal.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89822
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2015.0003
Copyright and License Information
Copyright (2014) Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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