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Kajian Dalam Bidang Ilmu Perpustakaan dan Informasi: Filosofi, Teori, dan Praktik

aimed to find an idea to keep the library to still be a necessary and the librarian is
still considered as the needed profession. The research method used is literature
study where literature material as primary resources completed with discussion
and observation as secondary resources. The result shows that although people
can access digital resources from the Internet, they still need to have interactions
with other to share a lot of things, and a library is the perfect place for those
interactions, and the professional librarian can lead the interaction to achieve its
goals.
Keywords: digital era, library, interaction, public sphere

I. INTRODUCTION

Since the beginning of their existence in the life of societies, libraries
have always been associated with collections of books, magazines,
periodicals and other printed collections which Jane C. Linder in her article
Today a Librarian, Tomorrow a Corporate Intelligence Professional (1992)
named it as Collection Era where all The library competed to have the most
collection of books. Libraries with the most collections were considered
the best and being most admired libraries. Then when the library became
an institution opened to the public, the people may also take advantage
of the many collections. New jobs and professions emerge, namely
collection loan servicers, known as librarians, and there were library users
who were served by their requests (in Law No. 43 of 2007 referred to as
«pemustaka»). Furthermore, studies were conducted to improve the quality
of library services which results in the addition and updating of collections,
the application of technology for processing and service (known as library
automation) and a comfortable place to read with decent and attractive
furniture.
An unwritten agreement in the interaction between librarians and
library patrons (pemustaka) located librarians as providers and they patrons
as claimants. In Indonesia, this interaction developed into an interaction
between librarians as «smart people» and users as «presupposed.» Because
librarians and libraries were considered as clever since they had mastered
many sources of knowledge, there was a demand on librarians to participate
in helping the government>s noble goals which were «educating the
people» through the «reading habit» program (Indonesia, PNRI, 2007)
which further demanded librarians to involve library marketing to make
people happy to visit the library and love to read. Until now the demand,
which is actually the librarian>s burden, still continues to emerge because
librarians seem to have not successfully developed fondness in reading.
The burden of librarians and libraries increased higher when it was

120 Library as A Center of Social Interaction in the Digital Era