ABSTRACT
When I received the program for this conference and saw that my talk would immediately follow our keynote speaker’s presentation, I was greatly relieved. This arrangement lets me complete the somewhat anxious task of presenting my thoughts at an early point in our proceedings. As I did some reading to prepare for today, however, I discovered that Sul and Don weren’t just being kind when they scheduled my talk right after Harold’s. I’m sure they were also aware of his piece on “The Tomorrow Librarian” in the January 1995 Wilson Library Bulletin and how well it leads into the thoughts I want to share with you today. In case you haven’t read that article recently, it’s a discussion of what Harold terms the “doomsday scenario for librarianship.” 1 That scenario, promulgated in various professional and general publications, involves a future without us, a time when technologies either “replace and improve upon traditional libraries” 2 or wreak havoc on libraries and society at large. I confess to being irritated by these predictions, by disparaging questions about libraries’ survival and future relevance. Then again, I tend to be irritated by disparaging questions about relevance in general. I was thoroughly annoyed, for example, by the April 1995 press conference in which a reporter had the impertinence to question Bill Clinton about the presidency’s relevance. (Of course, in an age when the leader of the free world can be questioned about his underwear on MTV, such questions suddenly appear tame and polite.) As I think through my responses, however, I find that weak answers exasperate me more than rude questions. President Clinton stumbled by dignifying the underwear question with a response and by offering a vague reply to the query about his relevance. Harold Billings, I’m happy to report, doesn’t miss a beat in the face of questioning, library doomsayers. He answers them with vigor. “I don’t believe a word of it,” 3 he says of all those gloomy forecasts. He then goes on to tell us why we shouldn’t, either.
