Of course information service staff need a basic understanding of IT, and need to be able to use the basic skills. But we do not know yet what organisational forms will emerge to support the electronic library, the digital library and the hybrid library. What we have now is inadequate and out of date even for conventional services. The best examples of converged information services now demonstrate the kind of multi-talents which are not technologically based, but are about changing attitudes and developing managerial abilities where they might not have existed so clearly before, among other things. They are to do with combining traditional skills with the ability to work alongside staff from what were separate services.
New roles is a team issue, and is part of structural change.
So let us stick to specialisation but learn how to integrate in an organisational sense. For a long time we will need the traditional librarian alongside the IT specialist, but maybe not in the same person. New roles will only come out of organisational change, not from attempts to graft disparate skills onto the existing body of knowledge. It is to the dynamics of teams that we must look for this. Teams make real multi-skilling possible and it is this that should illuminate the direction we take, not the need to create information workers with a vast portfolio of skills.