| Throughout the history of our profession, information-related activities have been often seen as diametrically opposing forces. Such have been pulling relationships between technical processing and public services, between library catalogs, periodical indexes, and finding aids, books and non-books, printed and born-digital carriers, between 'fixed' objects and others that are dynamic, between librarianship and education, between libraries, archives, museums, and other information agencies. Recently, the notion of digital libraries has introduced a new competitor, computer scientists and engineers (see, for instance, Communications of the ACM May issue 2001), and threatened to displace or alter some of the professional library skills. Examples include skills in question negotiation, analytical bibliography, knowledge of gaps, crossovers, and resources, expertise in collection development, discipline-specific seeking behaviors, scholarly communication, and many other types of skills and expertise that I will be discussing at the IFLA Conference. |