Maria Cassella in her keynote speech at the EAHIL 2014 conference reports that “Open” – i.e. Open Access, Open Data, Open Educational Resources, Open Peer Review, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) – has triggered a centrifugal trend away from the traditional channels of scholarly communication, including the library. This new trend contravenes the previous centripetal tendency of consolidation of all information related services in the library. As academics increasingly are in a position to produce and store data themselves – research data and publications, educational content; using repositories, cloud services and the like -, they use these new channels rather than the library. This could, ultimately, lead to the fragmentation of knowledge.

Librarians, so Maria, need to form partnerships to counter this dangerous trend: with faculty, students, IT. And they should develop new skills and professional roles, such as (as defined by the ALA as ‘core competencies in librarianship’ in 2009):

• data librarian
• digital cudrator/data curator
• scholarly communication librarian
• project manager
• ontologies specialist
• intellectual property rights specialist
• bibliometrics specialist
• knowledge facilitator
• educator

In the discussion, a colleague saw the risk that the wide range of highly specialised tasks could lead to specialisation and fragmentation of the profession of librarians. She was certainly right in the sense that none of us will be able to cover the full range of both our traditional and our new roles as a single person: we will need to split our tasks between several people with different focus. At the same time, as our roles rapidly change and evolve, we will have to keep up with these developments.