Radical Reinvention: Life Beyond the Library

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly,

-Henri Louis Bergson

Constant change imposes a pressure on all of us to keep up and adapt. These are the hallmarks of today's fast-paced, technology-driven society. Change affects every aspect

of our lives - from business to popular culture to our careers and families. Successful organizations, as well as astute individuals, manage to remain ahead of the curve, nimbly anticipating and side-stepping hidden obstacles. Consider IBM or Microsoft. You don't see very many Wang computers sitting on office workstations these days. Has Donna Summer scored a top 10 hit on the charts lately? Yet Madonna, the consummate master of reinvention, continues to flourish in the trendconscious, youth-obsessed music industry, even as she slides well into middle-age.

Those of us working as information professionals for more than 10 years have certainly witnessed firsthand our fair share of change. We've lived through the migration of card catalogs to Web OPACs, of print to electronic journals; we've gone from modem pools to high-speed Internet, from local CD-ROMs to global Web access. Sure, our library jobs have morphed into technical pursuits, in that we now spend an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting broken URLs, managing passwords and IP addresses, brokering complex license agreements, implementing end-user services, and so on. But can we exploit these highly developed specialized skills to transform our careers and ultimately leave the information center behind?