A friend of mine earned her library degree in the late sixties.  As the Internet was slowly added into the public domain, she took seminars to familiarize herself with the new technology.  I was privy to a conversation between her and my immediate supervisor about search terms for the OPAC and search engines.  The librarian in question said she always typed in a full question when searching and typed in every part of a title or author in the OPAC.  From my experience, these tool do not react well to wordy phrases.  The main conversation point was that she spent twenty minutes trying to find an item for a patron, but her methods weren't working.  My supervisor, who had early Internet technology integrated in her library degree, was aware of only using key search phrases and leaving out stop words.  The patron's item was found in a couple minutes.

Search methods, in my opinion, are how librarians will be used to the most in the future.  If older librarians and new librarians are not aware of how to use their tools to the best degree, how will anything be found?

Our entire world is going digital, for the most part, but I was watching a news program the other day about solar flares interfering with our power sources.  One occurred in the late 19th or early 20th century and caused some damage to what little electricity there was.  Back in the day, a power outage was no big deal and it still isn't...on a small scale.  Here we are putting everything in a digital format and deleting our paper prints.  What would happen if our power went our for good and all our resources were destroyed or too outdates to be helpful?  Do we conserve trees and space by having up to date, easy access information or do we continue to print books that take up space, kill trees, require page turning, indexing, cross-referencing, and collect dust?

We can always commit ourselves to darkness and find out.