This paper compares current responsibilities of systems librarians supporting the
traditional ILS with anticipated responsibilities associated with supporting the next-
generation ILS and examines how the roles of systems librarians will change in
migrating to the next generation ILS from the traditional ILS. The method used for this
study is content analysis. The content sources are online job banks for keeping an
archive of past listings over the past five years. The analysis results demonstrate a shift
is happening where the primary roles and responsibilities of systems librarians
supporting the next-generation ILS are becoming more human/organizations related,
while those positions supporting the traditional ILS show that top roles are concentrated
on information technology. Overall, this suggests that systems librarians are expected to
manage much less in terms of tasks directly related to information technology.
Consequently, systems librarians should re-engineer themselves accordingly so that
they will be able to support more critical issues in the library.