I read 3 of the articles, but Rick Anderson's article, "Away from the 'icebergs' ", generated the greatest interest for me and evoked a lot of positive head nodding. I have long been a proponent of doing away with "just in case" collection models, even while the Web was just starting its ascendance to its current position. Such a model seemed wasteful of resources, both human and monetary, then, and even moreso now.
Pursuant to that, I think it is necessary for public libraries in particular to really get on the ball and pay attention to upgrading the technology skills of its librarians. As we all know, ours is an aging profession, and it is not always confortable to learn such daunting new tricks 20+ years into your career. However, without learning these tricks, we both miss the opportunity to gain relevance with a whole new set of users while also pushing our profession towards the (perceived) brink of obsolescence by those same users. If we don't "give 'em what they want", they'll go elsewhere - someone else will gladly build and offer the resources they want, to the cheers of a ready market.
I believe as Patrick Jones once said, that we, as librarians, haven't had a chance to properly mourn the passing of what used to be our profession as we knew and practiced it for so many years. Maybe because the demise was so rapid - literally in a decade - we didn't have any time to mourn, only keep plugging away with greater amounts of work. Whatever, the society we live in now holds the cards and can dictate to us what is wanted; that's the new paradigm, as we as librarians have to embrace the flow and learn how to paddle effectively. maybe that's why Rick has an oar with him in the article.
I also stumbled across a recent post by Helene Blowers, the woman who got this Library 23 Things idea started (came across the LibraryBytes blog) that is germain to this discussion. The link to the brief post is below if you'd care to read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment