I spotted this chart a couple of weeks ago but didn’t manage to get around to looking at it more closely until tonight. Joyce Valenza’s put together a great chart looking at the quite dramatic differences that have occurred during her thirty years of practice as a teacher librarian. She compares the sorts of information sources and skills she learned in library school at the end of the 1970s (and again in the ’80s), with the skills and sources needed to serve students now.

Looking at cataloguing, for example:

Things that have changed	When left library school preservice (1976/1988?)	2006/ 2007 School Year	Implications for Future? Learners, Educators, Schools? Library Profession?
Understandings about cataloging	Sears and LC Subject headings	Sears and LC, and access to computer cataloging services. And: meta–tagging, tags, folksonomies. Emerging strategies for tagging non-print media—images, film, music	Need to rethink ineffective cataloging schemes to recognize power of keywords and tags that make sense to users. Cookery—India no longer plays! Personalization of the OPAC? Need to teach about tags, RSS, etc. as new ways to locate relevant information.

I think it’s a great chart, regardless of which sector we’re each in. Teacher librarians may find more to relate to immediately, but for me as an academic librarian, I can definitely see how the university student of the future is going to come to the academic library (or not!) with particular wants and needs. The same goes for public libraries and special libraries - as technology enables more and different interactions and becomes increasingly ubiquitous, so too will the expectations of all our users change. What role will libraries play in meeting these expectations? How do we ensure we are not bypassed as viable sources of information? “Why go to the library when everything is online?”

The version Joyce posted on her blog is a bit truncated, but follow this link for a clearer version of the chart.