Digital libraries and the future of the library profession

To argue that unique contemporary cultural shifts are leading to a new form of librarianship that can be characterised as “postmodern” in nature, and that this form of professional specialism will be increasingly influential in the decades to come.

A theoretical piece based on ideas from cultural history.

That postmodern library and information science (LIS) concepts will be a vital new strand to professional practice, but they will most likely subsist alongside more familiar concepts of practice which have proved readily applicable in the early years of “first wave” web technologies.

These are purely conceptual approaches to LIS and need to be investigated evidentially.

The change from “first wave” web technologies to Web 2.0 information technologies may have a greater impact on future techniques in digital librarianship than the change from print to the first electronic libraries in the 1990s.

This LIS paper is distinctive in that it borrows original ideas from the humanities to offer an understanding of LIS practice in the context of broad “cultural theory”, rather than in the narrower context of change in mechanical and technological processes.