Samuli Kunttu
Samuli Kunttu has been working as an Information Specialist at Helsinki City Library’s special music and IT branch Library 10 since it’s opening in 2005. Prior to this he has worked as Reference Librarian at Helsinki City Library and as a Librarian at
Do librarians need libraries anymore? ? A peek to the future
The aim of my presentation is to briefly discuss what kind of roles public librarians will take in the future and what kind of skills they will need in the future. I will try to show how the traditional roles of catalogue librarian and reference librarian will no more be valid in public libraries, as these tasks are more and more moving into cyberspace. A vast number of new web 2.0 based tools are available to anybody today. These tools and the ubiquity of the web means that these traditional roles are actually no more limited only to professional librarians, and librarians do not necessarily need libraries to carry out these tasks.
Following the main theme of this conference ? The future is here ? I will also try to offer some actual peeks to the future. It means that I will present some concrete examples of what kind of new roles public librarians are taking even today, and how library studies have prepared them for those roles. My example cases include two Helsinki City Library?s branches, Library 10 and [email protected].