Learning librarianship forever?

Paraphrasing a conversation I had last night:

The frustrating thing about the stock market is that you can never learn all you need to know. Every time you think you have a handle on it, it changes - unlike physics and history, where for the most part, true tends to stay true.

Librarianship these days has more in common with learning to understand the stock market than with the study of history or physics. You really can learn enough about the Civil War to get a pretty good handle on it and not have some new piece of information come along that turns everything you've figured out upside down.

The increasing rate of change of technology, though, means that learning librarianship is like shooting at a moving target - or trying to understand what affects the stock market. Those of us who've been in the profession for a while are working hard to get up to speed, to realize that technology offers wonderful new options for service, but we have to remember that there will never be a time when we can say, "I got it."

We have to stay engaged with those who are finding new ways to interact with information and each other, because sure as you think you understand it all, someone (or multiple someones) will come up with something new.

With that in mind, I offer to librarians (and information junkies) a link to the LISNews Ten Blogs to Read in 2008. One of my favorites made the list:

"Library 2.0 has something to it, even if we don't know what it is. We have to keep the stupid term and keep searching for the true revelation, which will undoubtedly come some day." -- Annoyed Librarian, 1/21/08


Currently Reading: "Flight of the Phoenix" by Elleston Trevor (which is 10 times better than the Jimmy Stewart movie, which is 10 times better than the Dennis Quaid/Hugh Laurie movie, which I actually liked quite a lot)
"There are certain men who, when faced with the choice of dying or doing the impossible, elect to live. This story is written in honor of their kind." -- dedication
The wind had flung the sand thirty thousand feet into the sky above the desert in a blinding cloud from the Niger to the Nile, and somewhere in it was the airplane. -- the first paragraph

Currently Listening to: the washing machine