Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog

I heard Anders Söderbäck of the Royal Library in Sweden speak in Lund last week on the perennial topic 'what is a library'. He reminded us of Daniel Dennett's remark:

This in turn reminded me of a post I did here a while ago about Dan Chudnov's definition of the mission of the library:

Dan Chudnov has an interesting post on the mission of the library. What is the all-consuming mission of the library? His answer is an interesting one, which on reflection works surprisingly well. He argues that his professional mission as a librarian is this:

Help people build their own libraries.
[Because this is the business we've chosen | One Big Library.]

What I like about this is that it - if I understand it correctly - covers emerging as well as current scenarios. Examples: to help with the creation, organization and curation of locally created materials, or to help with shared bookmarking/citation management/reading list services. As I suggest elsewhere we are developing a new vocabulary of collections: playlists, reading lists, repository, ... [Hedgehogs]

Here is Daniel Dennett in Worldcat Identities.

Related entry:

• What is the library