My mom recently told me about the advice a librarian, at a public library, had given her, about search engines to use for a given task, and the advice wasn't good. Google scholar is superior to a lot of search engines, in my opinion, but the issue is not even about individual search engines. I'm not sure what they mean by loud places. Do people congregate online and talk about searching for information? Even though the searching and accessing of articles, online, allows one to move rapidly through large numbers of articles, I've noticed that the main obstacle to obtaining information is still my own degree of closed-mindedness. When I haven't found things, it's usually been because my searches have been too restrictive or because I haven't thought to search for some slightly far-out thing. I tend to think that future librarians could teach kids in school to find information online by teaching them to scan large numbers of articles or website and then read, in more depth, ones that appear to offer the relevant info. Google scholar lets one do that a little, even by showing snippets of the full text. I don't know. For awhile I thought that librarians would have nothing else to offer people in the "internet age," but I think they could conceivably still have things to offer people.

Newly trained research librarians are all expert on electronic media. Library science is one of the degrees I recommend to people, because besides having a job (as far as I know they're always employable) you also have a chance of being part of a research team, and there are all kinds of things that someone can do outside the library world if they have top research skills.

Most people think of libraries as places to go for the latest publications, but their most important function is to archive old things, especially unpublished things, and things in which very few people are interested at any given thing.

Electronic media have given librarians new powers (for example, an enormous body of less-important medieval literature is available on the internet for historical study). But people who talk abotu how dead-tree libraries are a thing of the past have no idea what libraries do.

Only peripherally a response to the post. I'm thinking of the kinds of things that e-fututists sometimes say.

When I worked in the marketing research industry, I always tried to hire librarians (assuming they had some quantitative skills). The skills demanded are similar and the pay is higher in marketing research.

The patent repository at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh was an awesome resource in the days before all US patents got put online. Any technology you wanted to know about, and some hours there would give you an idea how it was done. Not usually too busy, either (even back then) - and probably near deserted these days...

Even before the advent of the Internet many public libraries were hangouts for questionable characters. This was and is especially true for libraries located within walking distance of homeless shelters, and even more so if the shelters are the sort that require "residents" to clear out during the day. Another issue facing libraries in all sorts of communities is the tendency of some parents to use them as discount babysitters. I've heard of some which have to post signs warning parents of prosecution if they leave children unattended.

I have a friend who grew up in a bad neighborhood with a disfunctional family. She spent hours after school every day at the library reading and ended up going to college and having a career.

In Portland they don't let people sleep or be rowdy, and if someone smells too awful they move him along, but most of the bums there are actually reading things.

Libraries aren't going anywhere, and neither are books. The electronic and print formats will co-exist. I am a librarian and I would never, ever want to be without the internet. However, the internet would not exist without a pretty huge backlog of printed or scripted material dating back, oh, thousands of years.
The library is evolving, not disappearing.
When I was getting my MLS, one of the subjects covered was the history of libraries and archives. I'd never thought about it, but the format of codices -- books with pages as we know them -- was rarely used prior to the early Christian era. The accepted and traditional formats were scrolls and tablets made of stone, clay or wax(!) Try doing research with dozens of scrolls, each measuring 10 ft. long, 20 ft., or more. You'd see a statement on one scroll and then try to find a correlation on another scroll -- but where? How to indicate it to students and then find it efficiently? Just not conducive.
Try carrying around clay tablets to a friend's house for an evening of study. Perhaps the ancients kept their information load to a limit to avoid dealing with heavy tablets and tangled scrolls.

The codices format was around in the mists of time, but nobody felt the need to commit written material to it other than notes, usually on a battlefield. This arrangement of written material was considered low-class. The Christians began to write their teachings in codices and this format began to be associated with them. The rest is history. The Christian manuscript tradition peaked in the middle ages with incredible illuminated volumes such as the Book of Kells. But, I digress.
Codices became popular because that format was easier, more useable by more people, portable, hideable, and more archivable, even if stone tablets did last better. Yet codices always were more convenient than other formats. So why did it take a religion to popularize it? You just never know about these things.
The computer is a different format, necessary to handle the explosion of information. The web was inevitable and I can't imagine life without it even though I was in my 40s before I started using it. Reading from a computer screen is ok--you get the info and you get it fast. But reading a book is a tactile experience that will (I think) remain with us.

In Portland they don't let people sleep or be rowdy, and if someone smells too awful they move him along, but most of the bums there are actually reading things.

A library in New Jersey, I think it was Morristown, booted out a skell because he was stinky, and he ended up suing the municipality and winning a huge damages award.

I'll miss physical books. I get way too easily distracted to finish one on the computer. I've got a whole bunch on my hard-drive I've not made any progress on for quite a while.

Hipster staffers who blog, chat on Twitter and care little about the Dewey Decimal System are edging out old-school librarians.

So you're more likely than before to want to punch the librarian in the face.

The hype is stupid, but on the whole it is a good idea to get some use out of libraries as public spaces.

I have gotten in the habit of reserving books from the library online. Based on the size of the reserve shelf, this seems to be very popular now.

American libraries are obviously a lot more fun than British ones. We don't get bums or porn.

http://www.metafilter.com/51859/...ling-the- goalie

is amusing and very relevant to the library porn topic.