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humanities researchers are going to rely on new kinds of librarians, and
those librarians will need to understand statistical and computational
methods, natural language processing, corpus linguistics, and digital
humanities, and they’ll need to be prepared to consult on those topics.

There are a number of other new roles for librarians and information
managers, who may be asked to design ontologies or taxonomies (for
scholarship, for science, or for business), or run social-computational

systems that support data communities of various sorts, or run
institutional repositories that become the collective memory of
universities, companies, governments, and other organizations. They
may be asked to act as publishers, or find new ways to connect disparate

data resources — for example, maps, biographical dictionaries,
newspapers, and digital image collections — in order to make possible
new kinds of exploration and discovery. And contrary to what we heard

from Wilf Lancaster this morning, librarians will have to engage these
technologies because of the needs of users, and not instead of them.
In the U.S., we sometimes hear the term “embedded librarian,”

meaning the librarian as a team-member in mutli-disciplinary (or multi-
divisional) teams that tackle problems which exceed the capabilities of
any one person. The scenarios I’ve just outlined all call for embedded

librarians. There are at least three challenges here: one is to prepare our
students with the appropriate expertise, the next is to coach them to
assert that expertise as part of the team, and the third is to educate their
colleagues to recognize and appreciate what they bring to the team.

Again, contrary to Lancaster, I see the need to educate our colleagues as
a recognition that none of us really deeply understands the nature of his
colleagues’ expertise, a problem compounded in our case by the fact that

too often, our colleagues mistakenly believe they already understand
what librarians do and what libraries are. As the digitization of resources
and the networking of access increases, the value of the librarian should
increase, not decrease, but librarians need to make sure that this

happens. The librarians of the future that I look forward to will serve as
equals, working alongside colleagues in a collective enterprise that
tackles problems whose scope and breadth will necessarily require many

different kinds of expertise, including expertise in information.
So, I’d like to talk now for a bit about the programs we offer, at
Illinois, to prepare students for information professions in the -1st

century. I’ll focus first on our general areas of study and then on a
particular specialization in the Masters program, the concentration in