THE LIBRARIAN AND THE NEW INFORMATION ORDER

Abstract

May I begin this work by reciting Crawford and Gormon's (1995) credo, "we believe in libraries. We believe in the enduring mission of libraries. We believe that libraries and librarianship have a future and that future is there to be seized by those with insight, realism, and yet daring.... Clinging to the past for the sake of the past is as futile as sweeping away the past for the sake of a delusionary future”. Having stoutly enunciated their credo, they went on to advocate....” A straight and narrow path between the librarianship of the nostalgia and the ill-informed embrace of any technology that happens to capture the magpie fancy of the moment”. This note of caution definitely raises the question of how much of the successive information related technologies is technolust and how much is evident triumph of futurism. The question also arises, why in spite of the enormous information technological break throughs, the book or the print media have refused to die.