2.0 - "Embracing Constant Change"

Certainly, once upon a time, if one wanted information that couldn't be found in home-owned World Book or Britannica encyclopedias that doting mothers and fathers invested in for the sake of assuring childrens' education (these were way too expensive for my parents , but they still felt obliged to purchase even a much cheaper and less reknown set), a trek to the library was a necessity -- how else could 5, 10, and 15 page papers be written? Well, according to Rick Anderson of the University of Nevada, how very arrogrant of we librarians to pressure patrons this way, especially if they were not "privileged with access to a good library?" -- makeTHEM come to US; what nerve! (And for that matter, can any library EVER be a not-good one?)

Now, as the decades pass and our humility so much more in tact, we no longer expect that "Muhammed come to the mountain;" the "preferred environment" for searching information and "reading" says Mr. Anderson, is, of course, the WEB, and librarians ought to, sacrificially, allow the public its comfort zone; our duties then, if there are still to be any, must focus primarily on helping with customers' (if there still remain customers) computer searches and needs, and less on print services. What about the ensuing assumption, that everyone OWNS a computer (like school teachers notoriouslly do -- how humble is that?) and the librarian should instead, and with every new day, become a "technarian?" And if the public is still inclined to make the trip to the mountain, perhaps our facility should humbly be decked out in everything technological -- empty the shelves of anything that resembles paper and replace with aisles of computers, cd players, and, perhaps most importantly, dvd players for in-house viewing pleasure. (Remember to leave room for any new gadgets coming down the pike.)

Oh, and to really hit home just how humbly we want to present ourselves, let's be rid of our title as Library (the "libr" part smacks too much of the word "book") and be re-named an "E-rary".

I know it's coming, and I'm bracing myself..... but for a little while longer, I need to un-humbly hope that a person will still leave their computers behind, not make a bee-line for ours, and ask me where Arthur Miller's dog-eared copy of "Death of a Salesman" is. Even "Cliffs Notes" are starting to take on a whole new prestige, now that a student, who's report is due "tomorrow," can get "Sparks Notes" on line.

When LIBRaries are, for me, the repositories of civilization's mammoth effort to make sense of our existence, I can't seem to "go quietly into that" keyboard night-- all of this, in my very humble opinion.