The Earthbound Librarian

John Blyberg nails it:

I was on a top technology trends panel at OLA last January when someone asked, “what if we don’t want to learn about all these new technologies?” (paraphrase). I don’t think I was in the mood for hand-holding because my answer was, “it’s your job.” Really. I don’t believe libraries are life support systems for staff. [emphasis mine] We need to work for our bread. That means that we have so stop bunting and try to knock it out of the park every single time. That takes passion, and too many people in every industry, including libraries, lack it.
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Having come to the library world from a horrifically inbred engineering firm (and I’m talking afternoon-on-the-Chatooga, Deliverance inbred), I can tell you with all certainty that this is not a problem specific to libraries. There is one thing that is more prevalent in libraries, however, and that’s a pervasive culture of entitlement. [emphasis mine again] Whether it’s the expectation that you’ll never have to step out of your comfort zone, that you’ll be able to settle in to a nice quiet career, or even that you have the right to have your great ideas met with ebullience. So, in the final analysis, I have a little sympathy for this particular plight, but it’s not keeping me awake at night–that would be the work I love.

“I don’t believe libraries are support systems for staff.” Our library has been engaged in a self-study process, looking at the future of the research library and its complementary missions of supporting teaching, learning, and research at the undergraduate and graduate/faculty levels in the 21st century. The two biggest challenges as the research library embarks on the quantum changes that are occurring seem to me to be (1) competition for resources with other areas of the university; (2) staff attitudes of the type that Blyberg nails above.

Don’t get me wrong–our staff has done a ton of growing, changing, and adapting, often with incredible grace, flexibility, and good humor, over the past several years. But the pace of change is forcing us to abandon old customs and expectations far more rapidly than is comfortable for most.

I recently started reading Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture via OpenLit. Check out the opening vignette describing how the invention of the airplane changed conceptions of land ownership, which used to extend to the airspace above the land. Lessig emphasizes the reaction of the justice to the notion that permission be secured before a flight can pass through the airspace above every piece of privately owned land along its path: “Common sense revolts at the idea.”

We in libraries are reaching the point where common sense is beginning to revolt at some of our ideas. Not opening on Labor Day weekend, when we are the largest computer lab on campus, the one every student knows about from admissions tours, and students need access to computers to get into their accounts (before classes start the following day)? Forcing users to click through multiple screens of an item record in order to get a call number from the library catalog? Hiding the millions of dollars worth of electronic content that we subscribe to behind several layers of confusing interfaces?

I don’t mean to be too harsh here. Libraries ARE trying. I fully expect that the items in the previous paragraph will no longer hold true within a couple of years. And if I had written this post even a year ago, I would have easily come up with a much longer list of things that we were doing, the idea of which common sense would revolt at. (Yeah, YOU try writing that sentence without ending with a preposition.) Still, too many things that fall well within our comfort zones as library staff are completely incomprehensible to many of our users and serve only to alienate.