Librarianship's Darwinian Moment

Scott has a good post today about his candidacy for the Board of the Medical Library Association. The thrust of his position: In the 21st century, it's about being librarians rather than managing physical libraries.

Before reading Scott's post, I happened upon an article by Mr. Thomas Mann of the Library of Congress. Mr. Mann argues for the continued validity of old-fashioned subject catalog headings (i.e., Banks, Marcus--Establishment Liberalism, To Some Extent) even in our Google age. Mr. Mann still highly values the physical library, and finds Google to be wanting in many ways.

I can't disagree with him about Google's limitations, but Mann misses the more important point: The Web has changed everything, and we aren't going back to a time when people had to know their Library of Congress subject headings in order to find things.  Librarians must find a way to cope with this, or we will become increasingly irrelevant.