Knowledge life cycles: Renewal and obsolescence

Abstract

The traditional need to collect, care for and make available a huge collection of physical items has shaped the education, work and even the sense of identity of information professionals, as well as the services provided by libraries. As the infrastructure related to physical items increasingly disappears from our responsibilities, we need to fundamentally rethink how we go about our mission to collect, organize, preserve and make available the information resources of the human enterprise. Various topics that are transforming the information professional's environment are discussed, including digitization, digital collections, open access, information abundance, etc.