Your ignorance will not protect you. Schneider at Free Range Librarian has this manifesto. Although I generally agree with the sentiments, that libraries and librarians must transform into something that may be unrecognizable, I do have some quibbles with individual ideas and with the overall tone.
To paraphrase Walt, a bit too much or and not a lot of and : All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday. Well, I can go on the internet right now and buy a horse-drawn buggy if I want.
Cars mostly replaced them, but not entirely. We have both cars and horses, cars and trains, cars and subways. Computers play chess better than humans do, but humans seem to refuse to just give up on chess.
Technologies may have a much longer lifespan than we think they do. We have to move forward, yes, and embrace the new. But it s also a mistake to assume a technology is dead just because it isn t cool anymore.
My mom has a vcr but no dvd player. If I assume that vcr s are dead, it seems I might be failing in my mission to serve a diverse user group. You fear loss of control, but that has already happened.
Ride the wave. Change happens whether we want it to or not. You are not a format.
You are a service. Actually, I'm a 43-year-old man who also happens to be a librarian. Libraries provide collections and services, and collections are usually in some sort of format.
If I intend to continue to provide collections, I have to be conscious of what formats are available, how demand of different formats are shifting and to make sure I allocate the limited resources I have to the appropriate collections. If I don't intend to continue to provide collections along with my services, I'm not sure if I still work at a library. I am not just eBay pr amazon for students, I am part of an educational mission which I take seriously.
Are wikis blogs services or collections? Maybe they're collections that have formats. The OPAC is not the sun.
The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system. The user is the sun. These two are a little weird.
I thought Google was the sun. Or was that Facebook. Or YouTube or MySpace.
Back when I was a software developer, we used to joke ironically that our systems would work just fine if it weren't for those darn users messing things up with their inconvenient demands. Libraries are the same way. OPACs are discovery tools, the ones we're mostly stuck with are a far cry from what Amazon or eBay have to offer their users, but on the other hand they have slightly bigger development budgets than most libraries do.
Since one of the things we provide is collections, the collections discovery tool is going to tend to be important to us. Even if it sucks, we have to figure out how to make the best of it. The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.
Haven't libraries always had users? Oh yeah, we used to call them patrons. The user is not broken.
Meet them where they are, not where you want them to be. On the other hand, using a word like "broken" implies something a little unhealthy. Users aren't broken, but they also don't have complete knowledge of the information universe.
Neither do we, but part of our mission to make their knowledge of the information universe a little more complete. Your system is broken until proven otherwise. I prefer to think of it as a work in progress.
Calling it broken seems a little harsh to me. Libraries and librarians work very hard to make their systems better and more accessible, working with extremely limited resources (we have basically one web programmer for the library for a school with 40K students) and with severe restrictions (millions of MARC records, a system we're stuck with that is too expensive to replace). That vendor who just sold you the million-dollar system because "librarians need to help people" doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, and his system is broken, too.
Blame the vendors, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Most of your most passionate users will never meet you face to face. Most of your most alienated users will never meet you face to face.
I agree completely and have written about how important this challenge is before. The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way. But I thought the users were unbroken sunshine, but here it seems that I can actually try to have an influence on them, as long as I'm not in their way.
Believe it or not, I actually helped someone F2F yesterday and may actually do so again today. Your website is your ambassador to tomorrow's taxpayers. They will meet the website long before they see your building, your physical resources, or your people.
But I think we should also pay some attention to our building, physical resources and people. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to find a library website that is usable and friendly and provides services rather than talking about them in weird library jargon. A bit harsh, I think.
I don't hate myself enough to believe that we as a profession aren't at least trying to make our systems better. Oh yeah, I blame the vendors. Information flows down the path of least resistance.
If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it. Your ignorance will not protect you.
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