A lasting library and future-proof librarianship. Competences for digital content development

Abstract

In higher education, instructors perceive, from the attitudes and reactions of the new generation of professionals, the ever-changing technological, social and economic context of library and information science (LIS), as well as the needs and competence expectations of students. They incorporate these experiences into the modernisation of training, constantly renewing, as appropriate, their own reflections – in many cases from decades earlier –, and may also draw important lessons for the future of LIS. This is necessary for effective university education, as students need to get an authentic vision of the future from their teachers: where is LIS heading, what will the library of the future look like, what will librarians’ role be in the era of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and data science? To answer the doubts raised by future professionals, it is not enough to simply deny clichéd predictions that, for example, robotics could take their jobs. In our study, we draw on the experience of our courses on digital collections to refute these misconceptions and derive four future-proof features of LIS: (1) the persistence of the indispensable role of human creativity, (2) the importance of professional use of social media to retrieve community knowledge, (3) the value of collaborative competences, and (4) the increasing value of a researcher’s attitude in the librarian profession.