How the Information Society is Reshaping the Information Profession

The way people find, store, and use information has changed completely in the last two decades. We no longer walk into a building to consult a printed card catalogue; we carry the world’s information in our pockets and expect answers in seconds. This shift towards an information society has not made information professionals redundant. Instead, it has redrawn their job description entirely. The librarian who once guarded shelves is now a guide through a vast and chaotic digital landscape. Understanding this transformation matters for anyone studying or entering the field, because the profession that emerges on the other side looks very different from the one described in older textbooks.

From custodian of documents to manager of content
Technological absorption and the evolving role
The socio-technical professional
Social, cultural, and educational missions
Building media and information literate communities
User empowerment and information mediation
From answering questions to teaching independence
Challenges: information literacy and IT literacy
The professional must keep learning too
What the profession becomes

From custodian of documents to manager of content

The most fundamental change is a shift in identity. For a long time, the information professional was understood as a custodian, someone who acquired, processed, and preserved physical documents. The rise of information and communication technology (ICT) has pushed the profession to move from being custodians of documents to content managers. The librarian no longer plays a passive role behind a desk. They now act as an active gateway to a huge range of information sources, helping users reach exactly what they need across formats and platforms.

This is not a small adjustment. It changes what skills are valued, what training is needed, and how success is measured. A professional who could once succeed by knowing classification schemes and shelving rules now needs a broader, more technical, and more human set of abilities. The four areas below explain how this plays out in practice.

Technological absorption and the evolving role

The first force reshaping the profession is technology itself. Automation now handles a large share of the routine work that once defined library jobs. Self-service kiosks manage checkouts and returns, and software handles much of the day-to-day administration. Catalogue and metadata tasks that once required hours of manual entry can increasingly be automated through AI-driven systems that tag, classify, and index records. This automation reduces some entry-level roles, but it also frees professionals to concentrate on strategic information services and direct work with users.

This means the role is not shrinking; it is moving up the value chain. When machines take over repetitive tasks, the human professional is left with the work that genuinely requires judgement, creativity, and care. Artificial intelligence in libraries can automate routine cataloguing and enhance search functions, which gives librarians more time to focus on intellectually stimulating activities. The skill set demanded has broadened too. Employers now value data literacy, data analytics, and AI fluency alongside traditional competencies, so the ability to manage large datasets and optimise digital archives has become central rather than optional.

The socio-technical professional

One useful way to describe this new identity is the idea of a socio-technical profession. Librarianship was long seen as a humanist profession concerned with reading, scholarship, and culture. Over recent decades it has become clear that the field is now best understood as a socio-technical profession that combines library and information science with communication, ICT, and broad general knowledge. The modern professional must be comfortable with both people and systems. They need to understand how users behave and what they need, while also being able to work with the technology that delivers services to them.

This blend is what makes the work demanding. Becoming a manager of information access also means becoming, in part, a designer of systems who works alongside programmers and technicians, and a service provider who supports users directly. The professional sits at the meeting point of human need and machine capability, translating between the two.

As technology absorbs the mechanical parts of the job, the social and educational purpose of the profession comes to the front. The information professional is increasingly an educator. This is not a side activity; it is becoming a core function. The profession has long been recognised as central to lifelong learning, and information literacy is treated as a cornerstone of that learning across all types of libraries and information institutions.

The cultural and social mission also extends beyond formal education. Libraries are public-focused institutions, often with a stated aim to reach those who are marginalised or left out of the digital world. In a country where access to devices and reliable connectivity is still uneven, this mission has real weight. The professional helps bridge the gap between those who can navigate digital information comfortably and those who cannot, which makes the work a matter of equity and inclusion, not just service delivery.

Building media and information literate communities

This educational role has gained recognition at the highest international levels. Global bodies now treat libraries as a key part of the effort to build media and information literacy for everyone. Working with UNESCO, IFLA has helped ensure that libraries are written into key declarations on media and information literacy. The reasoning is practical. Libraries and the professionals who run them are long-standing experts in finding, evaluating, and applying information, and that expertise is exactly what people need in an age of doubtful sources and information overload.

This is why information professionals are sometimes described as having a multiplying effect. International policy bodies have recommended special support for information mediators such as teachers, librarians, and archivists, because these professionals have a multiplying effect in building information literate societies. When one professional teaches a group of students how to evaluate sources, those students carry the skill into their own lives and work. The educational role therefore reaches far beyond the walls of any single institution.

User empowerment and information mediation

The third major shift concerns the relationship between the professional and the user. In an environment of overwhelming information, the value of a skilled mediator rises sharply. There is no shortage of information today; there is a shortage of reliable, well-organised, and trustworthy information. The professional’s job is to stand between the user and the chaos, helping people find good information and discard the bad.

This mediating function is now widely seen as essential rather than optional. In the age of information overload, librarians step in as crucial guides who, as custodians of information and knowledge, show users how to tell good information from bad, how to verify whether something is true, and how to search more effectively. These are precisely the skills that the open internet does not teach on its own. A search engine returns thousands of results; it does not tell the user which ones to trust.

From answering questions to teaching independence

Interestingly, mediation today is less about giving people answers and more about teaching them to find answers themselves. As users become more capable of searching on their own, the nature of the help they need changes. Librarians who improve their own information literacy can deliver better instruction, which produces more digital-savvy users, and the result is that professionals face fewer but more difficult reference enquiries. The simple questions are answered by the user’s own searching. What reaches the professional are the harder, deeper problems that genuinely require expert judgement.

This is a sign of success, not decline. The goal of good mediation is to empower the user to become independent. A professional who teaches a student to evaluate sources, structure a search, and judge credibility has done something more valuable than simply handing over a citation. They have built a skill the user keeps for life.

Challenges: information literacy and IT literacy

None of this is easy, and the profession faces real challenges in keeping pace. The two clearest demands are for stronger information literacy and stronger IT literacy, both among users and among professionals themselves.

The need for information literacy across society is urgent. Being information literate means being able to recognise when information is needed and having the ability to locate, evaluate, and use it effectively. In a rapidly growing digital environment, people increasingly need to find, assemble, process, evaluate, manage, and communicate information at home, at school, and at work. A fundamental part of this is being e-literate, because so much information now lives in digital form. For students in higher education especially, understanding the quality and organisation of information is critical when overload has become the norm.

The professional must keep learning too

The challenge is not only about teaching users. Professionals must continually upgrade their own skills, and this is where many feel the strain. The integration of new tools requires ongoing learning and adaptation, and there are known cases where professionals collaborate with IT specialists to maintain systems and must stay abreast of technological advances to remain effective. The professional who stops learning quickly falls behind the technology and the users they serve.

Artificial intelligence sharpens this challenge further. AI literacy has become an important skill for the field, yet there is a recognised need for professionals to become more AI-literate themselves before they can guide others. This matters in India, where AI literacy is increasingly viewed as essential, with emphasis on human-AI collaboration and the critical ability to assess AI outputs for bias, errors, and ethical concerns. For information professionals, that critical-awareness skill is a natural extension of the source-evaluation work they have always done. The difference is that the source is now an algorithm, and learning to question it is the next frontier of the job.

What the profession becomes

Putting these forces together, a clear picture emerges. Technology absorbs the routine and repetitive work, which pushes the professional towards higher-value tasks. The social and educational mission grows, turning the professional into an educator and a builder of literate communities. Mediation becomes central, but its aim shifts from answering to empowering. And the whole transformation depends on professionals committing to continuous learning in both information and IT skills.

The information society has not made the profession obsolete. It has raised the bar. The work now demands a combination of technical skill, teaching ability, ethical judgement, and a service mindset that few other fields require all at once. For students entering the field, this is reason for optimism rather than worry. The need for someone who can guide others through information overload has never been greater.

What do you think? As AI tools become better at answering questions directly, will the value of the human information professional come more from teaching critical judgement than from providing access? And in your own experience, do you feel adequately equipped to evaluate the reliability of the information and AI outputs you use every day?

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Table of Contents

From custodian of documents to manager of content 🔗

Technological absorption and the evolving role 🔗

The socio-technical professional 🔗

Social, cultural, and educational missions 🔗

Building media and information literate communities 🔗

User empowerment and information mediation 🔗

From answering questions to teaching independence 🔗

Challenges: information literacy and IT literacy 🔗

The professional must keep learning too 🔗

What the profession becomes 🔗