The Profession of Librarian and the Frontier Between the Library Space and Cyberspace

The general perception of the profession of librarian is affected by stereotypes due to lack of information. The instruction of a librarian, quite often ignored, must go beyond the limits of the education one gets at the university, the librarian’s main duty being to observe what is new in the international library community and to permanently adapt and update his knowledge and skills. The image of the scholarly librarian of the Middle Ages, frequently encountered until the late 20^th century, has become obsolete nowadays, as the attributes of the profession have changed radically. The direct consequence of the advent of online catalogues was the addition of a new amount of knowledge to the existing librarianship skills, the librarian becoming an information specialist. The combination between traditional librarianship knowledge and the skills claimed by the arrival of new technologies in the library, as well as their harmonization in the library activity has become a sine-qua-non condition for optimal processes and better services. The present library user has also a new image, his behaviour being decisive with regard to the configuration of the information access methods. Since the alternative associated with the library is the Internet, the information existing in the World Wide Web has turned the potential library users into great supporters of the search engines and of some interactive information and editing tools such as: wikis, folksonomies, tagging, blogging. Google and Wikipedia are visited by people quite often without questioning the truthfulness of the data found there. The new technologies may be advantageously employed in libraries, but the time saved must be used sensibly for activities which may attract the users to the library. The offered information has to be diverse and not restricted to bibliographic information. In the present paper a few initiatives are presented to illustrate the wide range of information and services offered to users by the Carol I Central University Library of Bucharest.

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