James Sweetland, Library Link Regional Convenor - USA

Recent discussions often seem to suggest that the days of the librarian are numbered, in particular that the development of the Internet in general and the Web in particular are making the "library" and its professionals obsolete.

However, there are several important parts of the role of the "librarian" which are critical for society, especially for an information-based society.

Traditionally, an important part of the training of librarians has been this concern with the needs of what we now call the end-user. Quite simply, my experience is that a large proportion of those who lack librarian training tend to ignore the user, and see the electronic information system as an end in itself. Demonstrators at trade shows often make a point as to how fast the information comes, or how much information comes, but then can't tell you how accurate the information is, or who created that data and for what original purpose. Similarly, print and televised commercials for Web based information often tell you how fancy the information is or how much you get, without any concern for the needs of the user.

An extreme example�in the first week of May, a cable television home shopping channel showed off a computer by searching the Web, incorrectly, for "college scholarships", retrieving about 1,600,000 hits. Of course, since the search was on an engine using implied "or", the system had retrieved enormous number of sites with the word "college", which had nothing at all to do with scholarships and yet had missed all those using terms like "university".

This simple event points up the critical importance of the "librarian ethic" in the electronic environment. We are and have always been concerned as much with precision as with recall: The traditional version of this concern is shown in the amount of time and effort librarians devote to selection of materials appropriate and necessary to their community of users.

With electronic information sources, we have inverted the traditional problem of information retrieval. Since the time of manuscript books, most information seekers have had to do their best to exploit rather limited resources�unless they were in a very large library. However, since the late 1970's we have been developing systems which access considerable quantities of data. Thus, especially as search engines become simpler to use, the most important problem is rapidly becoming how to eliminate irrelevant information.

While some would argue that a sophisticated Web search engine can eliminate the need for librarian assistance, and that the role of the librarian-as-intermediary is an outmoded elitist one, I argue the reverse. As the amount of information readily available increases, the need for a reliable, neutral "filter" becomes ever more critical. While it is true that librarians may have their own biases, at least the ideal is that the librarian's fundamental job is to find, interpret, and communicate information�not to restrict it. This is an important role, and even if we don't always live up to the ideal, the ideal is worthwhile.

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