There is a nice post by Will Sherman. 33 reasons why libraries and librarians will be important, even in the digital age. A large number of these reasons concern the relevance and quality of the materials hosted by a library and the expertise librarians have, for instance for describing books (etc.) adequately.

That is all fine. Will Sherman however seems to assume that all these different functions (re the management of information) are performed by libraries and librarians and that they will remain doing that. I tend to disagree.

No one doubts the importance of information management, but the tools and the workflows and the organisations that (should) exist to manage information require competences that are not easily found within library walls. Text mining, information retrieval, the management of peer review, publishing, the semantic web, ontologies, the architecture of the web, theories of classification, automatic term extraction, web archiving, the identification of authors, documents and institutes, protocols for information exchange, digital rights management, etc., etc., will be of growing importance and the skills needed for these tasks is at the moment not sufficiently available within libraries.

So the conclusion is:

Libraries "as we knew them" will become obsolete if they want to stay libraries. The same goes for librarians.

QED