The Atlas of New Librarianship

Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching forsolid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment. Whatis librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlasof New Librarianship, R. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. Hedescribes a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning; and hesuggests a new mission for librarians: to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation intheir communities. The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related usesfor information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field.Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge iscreated though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation;they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities. To helplibrarians navigate this new terrain, Lankes offers a map, a visual representation of the field thatcan guide explorations of it; more than 140 Agreements, statements about librarianship that rangefrom relevant theories to examples of practice; and Threads, arrangements of Agreements to explainkey ideas, covering such topics as conceptual foundations and skills and values. AgreementSupplements at the end of the book offer expanded discussions. Although it touches on theory as wellas practice, the Atlas is meant to be a tool: textbook, conversation guide, platform for socialnetworking, and call to action.Copublished with the Association of College & ResearchLibraries.

R. David Lankes is Associate Professor in Syracuse University's School of Information Studies and Director of the Library and Information Science Program there.