It’s been a while since I checked back with the Taiga forum and I find the site now largely locked down to members, but there are some updates for others to see. The most recently available in their series of “provocative statements” (TM) can be downloaded (see the pdf link in the bottom left corner) and it contains a few gems such as:
In 5 years, 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.
and
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.
There’s a couple of duds in there too, in my view (and theirs too, since they lined out the one predicting Google meeting everyone’s search needs), such as the predictions that 20% of ARL directors will have retired by 2015 or, the truly outrageous idea that the library community will insist on better ROI from organizations such CRL, ALA etc…..as if!
That said, it’s good to see some direct and clear statements on some of these issues, though one wonders if the motivation to provoke discussion is somewhat negated by the controlled membership structure involved. I was reminded to check the forum again by Sarah Glassmeyer’s defense of libraries in May’s issue of the AALL Spectrum where she accuses too many people of throwing in the towel too quickly. She reports the Dean of Libraries from a well known university as stating up front in a recent conference that the ‘library, as a place, is dead’. (Suzanne, was that you?) And she offers a good retort to Seth Godin’s implications that libraries have become irrelevant, drawing solace, like many before her, in Ranganathan’s Laws of Library Science. Ah, we have laws to prevent this kind of thing…..good to know!