Blended Librarianship

Abstract

I was elated when John D. Shank and Steven Bell accepted my invitation to provide this updated perspective on blended librarianship. John and Steven developed this concept of librarianship in early 2004. In this column, Shank and Bell explain how blended librarianship relates to old and new service models of academic librarianship. They also discuss the growth of the blended librarians online community, a group that they cofounded. Their reflections on how blended librarianship has had an impact on the profession are especially interesting. Even more interesting are their thoughts on the future of blended librarianship. Shank and Bell have written and presented widely on this topic. Both are active members in the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Steven is the 2011-12 vice president of ACRL.--Editor Change pushes academic librarianship onward. In the past, change was slower and adapting to it was more manageable. Consider the amount of time that accumulated between the shift from librarian-mediated online searching, to supervised end user searching, to CD-ROM searching, and at present to web-based searching. Each successive transformation in the delivery of database content took less time than the prior shift. Each change increasingly affected and changed the way that academic libraries operated. Disruptive innovations (e.g., new computing technologies) now emerge with even faster speed and power to transform the academic library and the role of the academic librarian. This is the central challenge academic librarians confront as they examine their current and future roles in higher education. This article examines blended librarianship's (BL) vision of the educational role of the academic librarian within the context of radical paradigm shifts occurring in society driven by the evolution of information technologies. Furthermore, several ideas (i.e., information educator and educational partner) will be explored, which blended librarianship posits help clarify the current and emerging instructional roles of librarians in academia. NEW REALITIES IN THE DIGITAL INFORMATION AGE: THE BIG SHIFT, DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION, AND THE INFORMATION TORRENT In today's world, as Michael Wesch proclaims, It's now ridiculously easy ... to connect, organize, share, collaborate, and publish with anybody to anybody in the world. (1) He continues by asserting that we have to move from knowledgeable--that is just knowing a bunch of stuff--to being actually knowledge-able; that's being able to find, sort, analyze, criticize, and ultimately create new information and knowledge. (2) This is a profound shift. The size and magnitude of this shift is difficult to grasp. The new reality, as discovered by Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez, is that daily digital activity contributes to a churning information tsunami. Humans generate enough data--from TV and radio broadcasts, telephone conversations and, of course, Internet traffic--to fill our 276 exabyte storage capacity every eight weeks. (3) John Seely Brown theorizes that for the first time in civilization, the traditional S-curve associated with societal infrastructural paradigm shifts--i.e., long periods of stability punctuated by short intervals of rapid change and disruption that is again followed by a long period of stability (decades)--no longer exists. Rather, in the Big Shift, exponential change is now the norm. This new paradigm leads to exponentially rising and compounding S-curves where the intervals between disruptive changes are shrinking and the long periods of stability that have traditionally existed are nonexistent. (4) If this is the case, then academic librarians must first have a clear understanding of why they and the library exist along with the ability to articulate it. The why is more significant than how of what librarians do, since the latter is going to be subject to constant, perhaps increasingly faster change. …