Let's Get Rid of the Urgency

I'm like a dog with a bone. I just can't let this one go. Maybe it's the title, The Catalog's Last Stand. Is it really?

I'm not convinced that libraries, library catalogs, and cataloging are "in peril." I don't think we're standing at the edge of a precipice looking down. And there's not necessarily tension between the desires of users and the direction libraries are going in. These future of library memes haven't rung true for me for awhile. But I'm not a traditionalist at all.

Here's an academic librarian, Wayne Bivens-Tatum, whose asking the same questions in a post titled, Are the Users Ahead of Us?

This brings me in a very roundabout way to the question in my title. I often read library blogs that argue we should be adopting new information technologies because that’s where our users are at. I’m not so sure. I think that those librarians are ahead of their users in this respect, as I believe I’m ahead of most of my users. As a reason to change, catching up with the users might not be a very good one, because I suspect most of the users might not be caught up with us.

Does this mean we shouldn’t play around with new modes of communication and information technology? Certainly not. It just means that some of the urgency of calls to change ring hollow for me. We must change QUICKLY and NOW! But that urgency doesn’t seem to fit the facts.

Comments

[Mark]

Hi Christine. I fully agree with you on this. And I don't know what I am; in many ways I am a traditionalist and in many others I'm anything but. [Of course, it all depends on how we define traditionalist in the 1st place.]

I finally got around to reading the Medeiros article this morning and I must say that I don't really find it saying much of anything at all. Except! It does feed this myth of peril, and provides good fodder for those you referenced in your previous post, particularly in #2.

And I will say that anyone who positively cites and especially who leads off with a quote from that utterly ridiculous Coyle and Hillmann article has automatically lost a large amount of my respect.

I have a lot of respect for Coyle and Hillmann but not for that abomination of an article. It also fits in well with this and the previous post. My complaints against that article are not worth recounting here (and are too long) but I'll just say that my reaction to it is one of the very few posts I have ever pulled.

Keep up the great work!

[Stephanie]

Christine,

I totally agree with you. I am more a traditionalist than not but I've not felt the urgency that others have. I guess I don't feel that my job is in peril. Sure, it is evolving but so is the whole discipline. I've thought that the shrill voices screaming for speedy change were shouting for the sake of shouting.

Not that I don't think change is a good thing, but it needs to be measured with a bit of commonsense. I don't think we need to go rushing out to compete with the Amazon's and Google's of the world. There has to be a middle ground between radically altering Librarianship and becoming Information Luddites.

[Chris Schwartz]

Thanks for the comments, Mark and Stephanie. I think I should qualify my post by saying that I'm a traditionalist in the sense that the majority of my work is still traditional library cataloging. I'm definitely not a traditionalist in that I'm very open to change--exploring the changes coming down the pike. And some of my work now also deals with metadata and digital collections.

Stephanie, I agree with you in regards to the need for change to be measured with commonsense. It gets to the heart of this post. How can library decision-makers make good decisions in an atmosphere of urgency. I don't think they can. I think the middle ground you speak of is where many libraries reside. That's why I like the paradigm of the "hybrid library"--it's a model that best suits the library I work in.

One of the things I'm working on is what academic library users really want. I hope to write more on this soon.