The Shifted Librarian

“What is a shifted librarian?” Jenny Levine asks in a short essay posted on this, her weblog site. Her answer is that there’s been a fundamental shift in how people receive and process information; no longer do we go hunting for it; it finds us, like a robot mosquito spouting ad pitches for underarm deodorants in a Philip K. Dick novel finds a commuter stuck in traffic. The so-called NetGen, the baby-on-board boomers now reaching young adulthood, have grown up with information overload, and now repositories of information—libraries—must shift to accommodate their needs. The site itself collates whatever is striking Levine’s fancy on any given day: cloning, marketing concepts, legal and ethical issues and talking washing machines, along with enough links to keep a surfer sub rosa.