Since one of the themes of this trip seems to be technology, I will comment on how easy it is to hook into the international grid here in Paris’s CDG airport. What a difference from the late 70s when I was living in Paris, sending my mother a letter every week, and calling home was so expensive it only signaled an emergency or one’s birthday. I am drinking a Starbucks chai latte, have called  our home landline via Skype, am now using my IPad  to write and take photos and occasionally read  on my Kindle to pass the time. I just subscribed to a fabulous service ACI Blog Index. Without it I never would have found out about reports like this one American professors using information: the latest Ithaka S+R survey results  (I would have if I had been reading Bryan Alexander’s blog).

Reading the library and information science reports and commentary here and through other organizational and institutional sources,  I’ve become convinced that the line between commercial and non-profit publishers will blur even further.  It will require an incredibly motivated and technically sophisticated workforce–you can see it already shaking out in the academic library job ads. If I were to do my career over I would jump at the chance to join the profession. Who wouldn’t want to be a scholarly communications librarian, or a digital archivist, or placed in charge of digital research services? And it’s not the same old–these jobs are different, much more cerebral and creative. These librarians–if they are even called that–will be the ones who will rethink, remix, and repurpose our information sources and services–it’s a challenging and liberating thought.