Technologies, research and future of the profession

Abstract

The success of information professionals in the coming years will depend on their commitment to research and development in the areas of identification, access, retrieval, storage, description and assessment of the vast amount of resources available. This research effort should be coordinated with computer scientists, not to seek their cooperation in specific technical tasks and developments, but to make significant progress in frontier areas of content sciences. Greater project participation by librarians is proposed, especially in European or international consortia, paying particular attention to the implementation of standards, advocacy of open access, exploitation of new interfaces, data networking and digitization. The process should include ethical issues, involve end users, promote resource integration platforms and extend formats coverage beyond text documents.