Practical librarians on the libraries’ transformation

Abstract

The author analyses the results of the survey of the trainees of the Higher Library Courses of the Russian State Library on the key issues of the conceptual paper by Vadim Stepanov “The Libraries and librarians in the nearest 20 years, or waiting for singularity”, published in the “Scientific and technical libraries “ journal, № 2, 2018). Stepanov calls for transforming the li-

braries into radically different institutions which he considers the only way to avoid the disaster in the information era. Stepanov considers the libraries to be the outposts of extreme conservatism and archaism, and argues that their acquisitions of printed materials in the era of digital resources makes no sense. The audience of the Higher Library Courses is made mainly of the professionals with the university (non-library) background, who are at the same time the practicing librarians, or those who are learning to become librarians. Generally, they have rejected such attitude and supported the original core nature of libraries though insisted that the libraries had to be continuously enriched with new titles, creatively designed and well equipped for better user services. The trainees of the Higher Library Courses have given their consent to the author to use the survey results.