What is the Taiga Forum? It is a community of librarians working at the Assistant/Associate University Librarian (AUL) and Assistant/Associate Director (AD) levels that are challenging the traditional boundaries of libraries. Vision and forward thinking is great but this group is just plain out whacked. I have heard of out in left field but they are not even in the field.
Their Vision or five year plan is summed up in their Taiga 4 Provocative Statements from Feb 20, 2009.
1. ... all librarians will be expected to take personal responsibility for their own professional
development; each of us will evolve or die. Budget pressures will force administrators to
confront the "psychological shadow" cast by tenure and pseudo-tenure that has inhibited
them from performing meaningful evaluations and taking necessary personnel actions.
Librarians who do not produce will be reassigned or fired.
Ok, This one isn't too Bad Of course people need to learn the new technology. Produce or get fired ? I guess that works just as good as bonuses or other incentives to get results but I can't say it is a morale boosting technique.
2. ... collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library
materials will be entirely patron-initiated. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is
actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be
competition over special collections and archives.
Whatever, Why not let the Booksellers do it completely for the library,that way you can be sure that they clear the stuff off their shelves that won't sell.
3. ... Google will meet virtually all information needs for both students and researchers.
Publishers will use Google as a portal to an increasing array of content and services that
disintermediate libraries. All bibliographic data, excepting what libraries create for local
special collections, will be produced and consumed at the network level.
For some reason this one was crossed out. I Don't know if that's because they feel it is completed or just a joke. Glad we can get rid of all those useless other Databases and Catalogs and Google everything.
4. ... knowledge management will be identified as a critical need on campus and will be
defined much more broadly than libraries have defined it. The front door for all
information inquiries will be at the university level. Libraries will have a small information
service role.
Knowledge needed on Campus ? How Ironic, too bad they feel a need to manage it. I guess this puts the public libraries out of business.
5. ... libraries will have given up on the "outreach librarian" model after faculty persistently
show no interest in it. Successful libraries will have identified shared goals with teaching
faculty and adapted themselves to work at the intersection of librarianship, information
technology and instructional technology.
Yup those homebound people, nursing homes and prisons are such a drag to bother with it will be so nice to know that successful libraries say to hell with special needs.
6. ... libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation,
instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology.
Calling Mr Atoz , You are needed at the desk someone just jumped through the Portal.
7. ... libraries will have abandoned the hybrid model to focus exclusively on electronic
collections, with limited investments in managing shared print archives. Local unique
collections will be funded only by donor contributions.
What they are saying "Local Unique collections", What they mean is "Books and printed materials"
8. ... library buildings will no longer house collections and will become campus community
centers that function as part of the student services sector. Campus business offices will
manage license and acquisition of digital content. These changes will lead campus
administrators to align libraries with the administrative rather than the academic side of
the organization.
Thats right they got rid of the "Local Unique collections" because the donors lost their money to Madoff.
9. ... the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership
organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will
be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or
regional consortia.
Or, they will do away with idiotic organizations and manifestos such as this and get back to real library work.
10. ... 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see
that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the
academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the
decline of the library profession.
Well this will be one way of getting rid of these high paid clueless administrators who thought up this garbage. Oh Shit now what do we do Mr Atoz has jumped through the portal also.
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I thought some of the those interviewed in the piece Librarian 2.0--Interviews of the future of librarians were a bit out of touch with their visions and and too wrapped up in techno - lust but this group sets a whole new level of OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY.
