Monday, October 29, 2007
Professions don't stand sill, but...
Michael and Michael referred to a post I made a while back about professions not standing still. It's always nice to get recognized for something, yet at the same time it forces one to reread their own material, which in my case usually leads to the realization that the ideas therein are only half developed.
Such is the case with that post, which I now realize contained a glaring omission. Professions may not stand still, but it is also true that professions accumulate new processes and priorities while continuing to maintain old ones. We hang on to the tried and true, we cast off the obsolete and we respond to modernizing forces by adapting to the new.
Librarians have to remain open to new technologies and library patrons have expectations that the technology environment they encounter there will be state of the art. Yet those same patrons also expect that libraries will have the same things they have always had and that they will still have the time and expertise to help them understand and navigate the knowledge of the world. The point begging to be addressed here is the inherent difficulty of adding to what we do while also maintaining some or large parts of what we have always done. For that matter, how do we even know what to cast aside? And once we have decided what to add and what to keep, and since it is bound to seem like more work, how do we manage the workload without sacrificing quality or the thing we most want to spend with patrons- time?
I know, I know- probably this is not so insightful, yet it is something that deserves to be pointed out and I should have in that original post.
Such is the case with that post, which I now realize contained a glaring omission. Professions may not stand still, but it is also true that professions accumulate new processes and priorities while continuing to maintain old ones. We hang on to the tried and true, we cast off the obsolete and we respond to modernizing forces by adapting to the new.
Librarians have to remain open to new technologies and library patrons have expectations that the technology environment they encounter there will be state of the art. Yet those same patrons also expect that libraries will have the same things they have always had and that they will still have the time and expertise to help them understand and navigate the knowledge of the world. The point begging to be addressed here is the inherent difficulty of adding to what we do while also maintaining some or large parts of what we have always done. For that matter, how do we even know what to cast aside? And once we have decided what to add and what to keep, and since it is bound to seem like more work, how do we manage the workload without sacrificing quality or the thing we most want to spend with patrons- time?
I know, I know- probably this is not so insightful, yet it is something that deserves to be pointed out and I should have in that original post.
