Why are we here?

I have returned to this question, as it haunts me. I hear conflicting answers in the library community, and I am concerned that we have not a unity of purpose. I keep thinking of two separate discourses to which I have been privy and which have echoed my own thoughts on the matter, only much more articulately. About two weeks ago I attended the Library Expo in Plano, Texas. The keynote speaker was John Canuel of the Jeffco Public Schools in Colorado. Many of the points he made struck home with me, most painfully, that if we are not relevant, libraries and librarians will become a thing of the past. I have long believed this to be true, but I feel that many of us are "fiddling while Rome burns" so to speak. Dragging our feet when it comes to changing the way we think about our purpose. What Canuel very bluntly said is that we must be willing to carve out a new mission for ourselves that fits the times we live in. If all we do is provide fiction books and talk about literacy in a traditional sense, librarians are not really necessary. English teachers can do talk about books, and aides can check out books. For that matter, students can check out their own books. However, librarians are uniquely qualified to teach the Seven Survival Skills for the 21st Century as outlined in The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner. Canuel posited that unless we thrust ourselves into a new role of helping to equip students for the futures they will face, we may find ourselves deselected, to use a library term. Librarians should be coordinating efforts to teach Information and Technology Literacy and merely collaborating on Literacy Acquisition according to Canuel. The second item that has helped galvanize my thinking lately was Doug Johnson 's column "Head for the Edge" in the November/December issue of Library Media Connection. In his view we have a schizophrenia of purpose divided between lit people and tech/skills people. Doug maintains that the lit people are in control. He also states that unless we see our primary focus as teaching information and technology literacy skills we will lack voice in technology implementation issues, which is a problem. We could become superfluous. He continues by writing that we may need to change our collaboration strategy by focusing on a school based approach rather than the one-on-one approach most of us have been using. Think about it. By getting a teacher here and there what have we really accomplished? Sure, some students learn, we feel validated, but what if we could work school wide, or even district wide, and affect every student in school instead of just the ones in Mrs. X's class? What a difference that would make! I think it is time we stopped spending so much time cheerleading and spend more working effective change in ourselves and our schools. I know that most of us are not in a position to call for top down change, but think about what you can do. In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." But I would contend that we need to be more systematic in our approach, solidify what our true mission is in regard to the world we and our students live in, and proceed with a plan, not higgledy piggledy as has most often been the practice in the past. After all, we all want our students to be prepared for life in the 21st century.