Richard Akerman on Library Futures

John Dupuis (Confessions of a Science Librarian blogster) interviews Richard Akerman, Technology Architect at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), author of the Science Library Pad, and SciFoo Camp 2007 invitee.

Dupuis: "Can academic/research libraries change fast enough to stay relevant? Similarly, can libraries rush to transform themselves into the wrong things, and just a different path to irrelevance?"

Akerman: "I think there was a big, big intermediation role that libraries just have to let go of. It isn't coming back. And there's also a big, big technology investment, in catalogues and ILS systems that worked in ways that librarians understoood, that were basically library operations, turned into computer programs and databases."