Professional Discourse

Some valid observations and points are made by
Rory Litwin:

"When I look at the professional discourse and the types of professional development activities librarians are involved in, I do see a real conflict, which is a conflict having to do with how librarians engage in continuing education. It is not that tech tools aren’t useful; the problem is the degree of pressure to “keep up” with tech tools and the absence of pressure to “keep up” with the intellectual fields we are supposed to be supporting. It seems to me that things are not in anything resembling a balanced situation and that we are swiftly becoming an unintellectual profession. The problem I see with this is that the result is deprofessionalization, since the techie skills aren’t things that we can do better than other people but things that programmers and web designers are already doing better. This is in contrast to the way that we assist users using our bibliographic knowledge; nobody does this better and there is no substitute for it."