TBLC News

I need to follow up on Beth’s “Sacred Cows?” post.  For years—make that centuries—libraries have been drawing lines around their services.  “Only catalogers can do this!”  “Only reference staff can do this!”  “We serve only this geographic area!”

Piet Hein (whom you will probably Google after you read this) created a short epigrammatic literary form called the “grook.”  Here’s one of them.

On Problems
Our choicest plans have fallen through,
Our airiest castles tumbled over,
Because of lines we neatly drew
And later neatly stumbled over.

We can and will still draw lines to help us define a service or a service population.  But we have to learn to draw them very lightly.  With dry erase markers.  And admit that they may be in the wrong place, even as we are drawing them.  As a guy whose attention span falls somewhere between ‘chipmunk’ and ‘toddler,’ I think this is just fine.  (Usually.  Unless they are my lines.)  But even librarians who are actual grownups need to get comfortable with rapid, seemingly disruptive, change. 

We know the cause (Can you spell WWW?), and we’ve seen some of victims:  the music industry, the auto industry.  Our job is to be smarter and more nimble than they have been.  Hint:  TBLC is here to help with that.

Al

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 8:52 am and is filed under General interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.