A presentation delivered on 18th April 2013 at the BIALL / CLSIG / SLA Europe Graduate Trainee Open Day. Discusses the emerging role of the 'digital librarian', how I developed into this career, and what skills are required of future librarians.

1. Digital librarianship
BIALL / CLSIG / SLA Europe Open Day
Simon Barron
Project Analyst – British Library
@SimonXIX

2. 1543: the Copernican Revolution
From Nicolaus Copernicus’ De
revolutionibus orbium
coelestium (1543)

3. 1859: the Darwinian Revolution
From Thomas Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863)

4. 20th century:
the Freudian
Revolution

5. 21st century: the Digital Revolution

6. 1 exabyte
= 1018 bytes
= a 50,000 year
long DVD
= 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

7. 12 exabytes of data
= 12,884,901,888 gigabytes
= 403 million microSD cards
From the dawn of humanity to the creation of
computers:

8. 2002:
5 exabytes of data
= 37,000 libraries the
size of the British Library

9. From 2006 to 2010:
161 exabytes to
988 exabytes
Percentage increase of
514%

10. The digital
librarian
rises…

11. 1986 – 2009
Keen amateur
(but unaware of it)
digital librarian

12. 2009 – 2010
MA Library and Information
Management
Manchester Metropolitan University

13. “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his
books, records, and communications, and which is
mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding
speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement
to his memory.”
From Vannevar Bush’s essay, As
We May Think (1945)

14. From Paul Otlet’s Traité de documentation (1934)

15. “[Consilience is] a “jumping together” of
knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based
theory across disciplines to create a common
groundwork of explanation.”
From: Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the unity of
knowledge (1998).

16. 2010 –2011
Assistant Librarian
Army Foundation College
Harrogate

17. 2011 – 2012
E-resources
Co-ordinator
Durham University
Library

18. 2012 – Present
Project Analyst
(Qatar)
British Library

19. The British Library /
Qatar Foundation Partnership
“…to provide long-term access to digital
copies of geographically-scattered
collections of archives and manuscripts
relating to the Arabic world through a
portal.”

20. “…more than 500,000 pages from the archives of
the East India Company and India Office….”
“…25,000 pages of
medieval Arabic
manuscripts…”

22. “As the great Argentinean author Jorge Luis
Borges put it, “everything touches
everything.””
From: Albert-Laszlo Barabási, Linked: the new
science of networks (2003).

23. Libraries are changing…

24. “…significant inter-section between the
skill sets of librarians and the skill sets of
IT professionals.”
From: Mathews & Pardue, 2009. The Presence of IT
Skill Sets in Librarian Position Announcements.
College & research libraries, 70 (3), p. 256.
72% of job ads (from ALA’s online JobList
over five months) contained at least one IT
skill.

25. Librarianship skills
Cataloguing
Metadata
Licensing
Technical library services

26. IT skills
Systems development
Web design
Coding
Hardware troubleshooting

27. Communication
Teamwork
Relationship management
Jargon
translation

28. Intellect
Curiosity
The spirit of adventure…

29. Questions?

30. “The really important kind of freedom involves
attention and awareness and discipline, and
being able truly to care about other people and
to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad
petty, unsexy ways every day.”
David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College commencement speech, 2005.

31. Miscellaneous photos by Simon Barron.
Qatar Programme image scans from British Library.