The challenge of digital librarianship is to maintain the balance between cataloguing the existing materials on the Internet and creating new materials that serve students and scholars. Libraries have become passive. Publishers put out books, and librarians buy them, catalogue them, and store them. These functions are important. But new technologies give scholars and librarians a chance to create and promulgate texts and other resources. As academic publishing becomes more expensive, the need for alternative resource will grow.
A forest of information exists on the Internet, and for it to be used effectively and educationally, it needs to be catalogued. It needs to be sorted by subject with annotations that indicate the level of expertise and other topics covered in the document. Linking is a wonderful tool, but having an idea of the way the material relates to one's topic makes linking an even better tool. Search engines can provide a list of documents in which a word appears, but the human annotator provides a sense of the usefulness of the documents.
Areas of study are unequally represented on the Internet. In some fields, people have begun to make large amounts of material available. In other fields, little or nothing exists in electronic form. One of the librarian's tasks is to solicit and create the texts in areas where little exists. This can be done in a number of ways. Scanning books that are out-of-copyright but not obsolete is the first step. The second step is editing the book into electronic form. The editorial process will include bringing the material up-to-date, in the same way that people have continued to update Gray's Anatomy. A technical challenge in this will be to find ways for students to contribute to the revisions of the text through comments and questions. In this manner, course and text can live and develop together.
Goverment documents are another source of available material that can be scanned in and used in an electronic library. Documents of general interest are often buried in the sheer volume of governments reports and are often catalogued separately from books (and kept in separate rooms). Electronic classification allows for the documents to be integrated into the appropriate subject areas.
Texts, whatever their form, have a life beyond themselves; they contribute to the garden of information that nourishes students and culture. Texts need to kept, and they need to be tended. The librarian has this custodial role, which is not simply an adjunct role. Our civilization is an ecosystem. It has grown out of the ideas expressed in the past, and it will continue to grow through the nuturance of those ideas and the ideas that shoot from them and beyond them. The task of the librarian is that of a good agriculturalist.