As library technologists and librarians are well aware, since the advent of the Internet, the relationship between the user and his/her library has changed.

In a world of quick-and-easy search engines and of online social networks—in which information gets shared at an astonishingly rapid rate—information retrieval and aggregation are no longer the purview of the library institution alone.

“[N]ow that I am a library administrator dealing with staffing and budget issues on a daily basis,” states Dr. Brad Eden, in the “Introduction” to the sixth issue of Library Technology Reports in 2007, “it has become quite clear that the way libraries do business just isn’t working.”

Eden, who early in his library career worked as a cataloger, is now the Associate University Librarian for Technical Services and Scholarly Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Also in his “Introduction,” Eden chronicles, through his own career, how the library institution and its role have changed and continue to change in the Information Age. In addition, he asserts, “So, going beyond the arguments about whether the library catalog is important or of value (it is), and going beyond the arguments about whether structured metadata, in MARC or something else, is important and of value (it definitely is), the reality is that libraries have limited resources to compete and position ourselves in the new information universe. We have gone from a monopoly, which could impose whatever rules and software and search strategies that we wanted on our users, to a bit player in market overflowing with technological gadgets, tools, and algorithms that capture the attention of the public and leave libraries with but a slim slice of the information pie, all in the space of approximately 15 years.”

Articles, information science
information organization, library technologists