Reading up on the librarians take on this issue gave me pause to think further on the consequences of the shift toward enabling the general population to find any information that is available. After reading this particular entry I added my own perspective, which is as follows:

I would argue that there is a quantum mindshift that is occuring right now, and the biggest bottleneck is the paradigm inside of which we are operating. Paradigms have a very nasty habit of being invisible when viewed from the inside (kind of like dreams; in both cases, it takes a significant amount of mental labor to become aware of the boundaries). I would like to make a couple of observations that may bring the boundary of the current predominant paradigm into focus a bit.

People are outgrowing the need for librarians. Ironically, the job description is morphing into something like: obsolete yourself as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then to reinvent what you do at a higher level. The growing demand for information will no longer make it tolerable to stand in line for information, or to explain my issue to a human being before getting an answer. Roy’s maxim above, that people like to find more than they like to search doens’t even quite go far enough. People like much more than to find. In the same way that searching is just the prerequisite to finding, finding is just the prerequisite to contributing. People ache to contribute, and they are doing so with folksonomies, and wikis, and applications for building applications that will soon do everything from indexing the worlds knowledge to solving unheard of problems (see ning.com).

Our linear solutions for solving large scale problems are no longer agile enough to accomplish the task before us. We are shedding the skin of the current paradigm. The best we can do is to let go of it, and embrace the omniarchy of multi-paradigmatic navigation.

The population is becoming empowered and situated to start making most conventional jobs obsolete. We are used to thinking of people as needing the help of an expert to do make real headway on any significant task. Most hierarchies are set up to concretize the expertise of individuals. These silos are to restrictive for the kind of collaboration that is striving to be born. Rather than looking at division of labor, we should start looking at multiplication of labor. Rather than thinking of ways in which you can more efficiently give people access to your expertise, learn how to hand them your expertise so that you aren’t part of the bottleneck between them and their contribution.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the bumber sticker that reads “Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.” Perhaps it needs to be updated and brought back. It should now read: “Follow those who lead by getting the hell out of the way.”

[Metacomment: I realize that I’m a bit behind the curve here. I just caught up with Brewster Kahle’s talk at ITConversations. In it, he mentioned the Googlezon presentation, which I watched. I wanted to know who else was looking at this, so boogied over to del.icio.us to check out the tag, and came upon the LITA Blog. We need to keep an eye out for the librarians, because they are on our side.]