I received my shiny new copy of the annual University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science alumni newsletter this weekend. Paging through it, I happened up on a word I'd not heard before. Informatics. It appeared in the professional histories of several new faculty members. I hurried to the best resource for identifying unfamiliar concepts, Wikipedia! Turns out informatics is the study of, you guessed it, information. That seems to be a better description of what my colleagues and I do than the word "librarian," what with its root word libre, referring to books. Like it or not, books are becoming less and less the central focus of the 21st century library. Now if it were just possible to teach a four-year-old to pronounce informatician...

Stephen Bertrand
Assistant Director