Reinventing Librarianship: The Gig Economy and the Changing Boundaries of Library Service

The gig economy is changing how work is organized, and this has implications for librarianship. Gig work, coordinated through digital platforms, has expanded beyond low-skilled tasks into knowledge-intensive and professional activity, producing workers who are mobile, independent, and detached from any single institution, yet heavily dependent on information to sustain their work. This paper argued that this development challenges librarianship in two connected ways. First, gig workers form an emerging information community whose needs, spanning professional development, digital skills, market information, regulatory and intellectual property knowledge, and continuous learning, fall outside the institutional affiliation and physical proximity that traditional library service has depended on. Second, librarians themselves can apply their expertise outside the conventional library institution, through freelance consultancy, embedded and remote research support, information brokerage, and related practices, raising questions about whether professional librarianship must remain tied to library employment. The paper examined both developments, along with the opportunities and risks they raise, and proposed a shift from institution-centered librarianship to information-community-centered librarianship, in which the library is understood less as a fixed place and more as an information infrastructure. It concluded that reinventing librarianship does not mean abandoning its traditional values, but extending the capacity of the profession to respond to changing forms of work, knowledge production, and information use.