Best Word Book Ever – When you Grow Up #2

Originally uploaded by kokogiak.

Merlin Mann (my own personal guru of the funny-alpha-geek persuasion) of 43 Folders has a nice podcast up titled The Richard Scarry Book of the Future.

He talks about vocational training in his public school as a kid, the idea of which seemed to be to give all students some work skills to fall back on. He contrasts that training with what he sees himself and his friends actually doing in the workforce:

I think everybody that I know today, almost to a person, has a job that didn’t even exist 25 years ago. And if they have a job that existed 25 years ago, the people who had that job 25 years ago wouldn’t even recognize it today, ’cause of how much these jobs have changed, right? I mean, even the most ordinary desk job has been completely upended by technology and so many of the changes in how we work.

I have thought about this often on the days that I have spent working on web pages, sending email, etc. My job has obviously been around for a lot longer than 25 years, but I wonder how I would have spent most of my working hours in, say, 1980. Typing catalog cards?

Merlin goes on to talk about how he liked Richard Scarry’s fantastically detailed pictures of Busytown, with all the little animals performing their jobs as nurse, fireman, policeman, etc. He wonders,

What will the Richard Scarry book of the future look like? Because based on my experience, and the experience of most of my friends, I think it is going to be about 80 lavishly-illustrated pages of a cartoon mouse sitting at a desk typing with headphones on [which is, of course, exactly what I was doing as I transcribed these quotes from the podcast -SL]. Because that, in a nutshell, is the occupation of almost everyone I know…

All those little mice sitting at all those little desks are exercising a huge skill set that they had to learn completely on their own.

Using colorful language, he expands on the idea that we all need to get better at skills that are seldom taught, such as how to work on team, how to communicate better, and how to be an autodidact (I guess that would be a tough one to teach…).

I’m generally with him on this assessment; to be a librarian today is to be constantly expanding our skill set, dealing with new technologies, and new expectations. The more of us who feel comfortable tweaking and customizing our online environments, the better we will get as a profession at providing useful services in the online world. And, by and large, we need to learn those skill on the fly, teaching ourselves and sharing those skills in semi-formal venues like blogs and presentations.

I don’t mean to suggest that prior to the advent of the World Wide Web librarians never needed to change and grow. I would say that this uncertainty about what even the short-term future will demand of us is new.

Lastly, forget about the Richard Scarry book of the future, and check out the Richard Scarry book of the recent past. See the differences between the occupations and gender roles in the 1963 and 1991 editions of The Best Word Book Ever as seen in this Flickr photoset by kokogiak. (I linked to this a while back in the See Also del.icio.us linkblog.)

Tags: library, 43folders, richard_scarry, work