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:
