Dan Chudnov has an interesting post on the mission of the library. What is the all-consuming mission of the library? His answer is an interesting one, which on reflection works surprisingly well. He argues that his professional mission as a librarian is this:
Help people build their own libraries.
[Because this is the business we’ve chosen | One Big Library.]
What I like about this is that it – if I understand it correctly – covers emerging as well as current scenarios. Examples: to help with the creation, organization and curation of locally created materials, or to help with shared bookmarking/citation management/reading list services. As I suggest elsewhere we are developing a new vocabulary of collections: playlists, reading lists, repository, …
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