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Keynote
Address
Libraries are Good-But Librarians are Essential! |
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 Speaker:
T. Scott Plutchak, Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences and Associate Professor, University of Alabama at Birmingham Biography: T. Scott Plutchak is Director of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). From 1999 through 2005 he was the editor of the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA), and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Medical Library Association. He is a frequent guest speaker on topics ranging from intellectual property to scholarly communication to the future of librarianship, and leads the international librarian rock band, The Bearded Pigs. Abstract: The digital world explodes our notion of the role of the librarian. In the past, because virtually everything that a librarian did took place within a physical library, we have used the terms "library" and "librarian" as if they were synonymous, as if the librarian could not survive without the library. But this is far from actually being the case. In the digital world, individuals have access to many, many more sources of information than what they can find in any individual library. As a result, the complexity of the "information space" has become so great, that the particular skills that librarians can bring to the challenge of connecting people with the accumulated intellectual, scientific, and creative wisdom of other people are more necessary than ever. The librarians who will thrive in this new world will be those who recognize that "the library" is only one among many tools that they now have at their disposal. |
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