What is New in Libraries? — And How New?

The techniques long familiar to librarians mainly originated in the 19th century and were implemented with spectacular success in the 20th century (MARC, online catalogs, OCLC, Medline, etc.). They were deeply based in the technologies used: books, cards, databases, and telecommunications. But now, rather suddenly in the 21st century, the familiar techniques begin to seem irrelevant as several quite new and different techniques have arisen, mostly from outside of librarianship and based on new technologies (the Web, artificial intelligence) and a closer integration of libraries with their communities: geo-referencing, external authority files, ontologies, FRBR, and RDA, link-based technologies, visualization, the Semantic web, tagging, and others. How much of this is really new? How does the new relate to the old? This situation opens the possibility for new and better forms of library service and a fresh understanding that combines bibliography with data management.