In the introduction of his recent book “Book numbers Indian
and Cutter” referring to the reality of digitization and the
establishment of virtual libraries, Satija (2008) notes that in the
digital future, the need for book labelling and organization skills
may become superficial. Indeed, if examining trends in
librarianship from the 1980s, we can clearly see how some
professional skills have been gradually moved from the core of the
profession to specialised niches of activity. For some time now
librarians have been graduating from library schools in the United
States, United Kingdom and many other Western European
countries with only a vague knowledge of cataloguing and
classification. We are already used to the fact that libraries
outsource rather than employ cataloguers and we now also see
more and more trades and industries replacing their special libraries
with outsourced information searching services. So what is the
point in discussing the skills required to efficiently label and
arrange shelves, which are even more specialized and less respected
than those required by cataloguing, classification or reference
services?