Librarians and Abundance

The management of 'scarcity out' gave libraries a reason to erect a wall between themselves and users. It allowed them to claim, often correctly, that on their side of the wall was not only the budget to pay for the materials that would be provided by the library, but also the expertise to make optimal use of them.
What was wrong, however, was their belief, or claim, that such expertise was unattainable except by the trained and initiated. The identification of access or provision with expertise has been lost due to the explosion of retrievable digital information and the shift to an expectation of 'abundance out'. Libraries still manage the budgets that provide the access, but they have lost their claim to scarce expertise in the finding and use of information. Users can do that for themselves, and they seem to prefer it that way.