A few days ago I posted (The opportunities that libraries missed) a link to Peter Murray-Rust's blog where he is discussing the future of the library and getting ideas for his talk at JISC's Libraries of the Future Debate at the Bodleian April 2nd 2009.

The whole series of his posts (starting with librarians of the future - part I) and the comments he received from readers are definitely worth reading.

Peter Murray-Rust, of the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge, looks at the opportunities that libraries missed. This is a must-read.

He says that Libraries once had a central role in guiding scholarship but that neither Libraries nor Librarians do anymore. He traces this decline to "two major missed opportunities where, if we had had real guaradians of scholarship we would not be in the current mess - running scared of publishers and lawyers."

• The library of the future - Guardian of Scholarship?, by Peter Murray Rust, petermr’s blog, March 19th, 2009.

So, simply, the librarian of the future must be a revolutionary. They may or may not be Librarians. If Librarians are not revolutionaries they have little future.

An interesting editorial item from the New York Review of Books by Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard He has actually been tilling these intellectual fields for awhile for NYRB -- here is a list of submissions. Goes without saying that I disagree with some of his observations. But with more than 100 days left on the current time clock, I will address those concerns another time....

See you on Day 32.

The folks at the The Institute For The Future Of The Book and the Digital Library Federation are having a series of brainstorming meetings to discuss what they call "the really modern library." Read more at the Institute's blog:

• the really modern library the institute for the future of the book, October 8, 2007.

The goal of this project is to shed light on the big questions about future accessibility and usability of analog culture in a digital, networked world.