Outgoing Editor's Column: Parting Thoughts

More from the Far Side of the K-T Boundary In my September column, I offered some old-school suggestions for how we as a profession might cope with our confused and unbalanced times. Since then, several more have crossed my mind, and I thought I'd offer them, for what they may be worth: * We can outsource everything but responsibility. Whether it's "the Cloud," vendor acquisition profiles, or shelf-ready cataloguing, outsourcing has become a popular way of dealing with budgetary and staffing stresses during the past few years. Generally speaking, I have serious reservations about outsourcing our services, but I do recognize the imperatives that have caused us to resort to them. That said, in farming out critical library services, we do not at the same time gain license to farm out responsibility for their efficient operation. Oversight and quality control are still up to us, and it simply will not wash with patrons today, next year, or a century from now to be told that a collection or service is unacceptably substandard because we outsourced it. A vendor's failure is our failure, too. It's still "our stuff," and so are the services. * We're here to make decisions, not avoid them. Document delivery, patron-driven acquisitions, usability studies, and evidence-based methodologies should help to inform and serve as validity checks for our decisions, not be replacements for them. As with outsourcing and our over-reliance on technology-driven solutions, I fear that these services and methodologies are in real danger of becoming crutches, enabling us to avoid making decisions that may be difficult, unpopular, tedious, or simply too much work. But if decisions regarding collections and services can be reduced to simple questions of demand or the outcome of a survey, then who needs us? It's our job to make these decisions; demand- or survey-driven techniques are simply there to assist us in doing so. * Relevance is relative. We talk about "relevance" in much the same breathlessly reverential voice as we speak of the "user" ... as if there were but one, uniquely "relevant" service model for that single, all-encompassing "user." One of the perils of our infatuation with "relevance" is the illusion that by adopting this or that technology or targeted service, we are somehow remaining relevant to "the user." Which user? Just as not all patrons come to us seeking potboiler romances, so too not all users demand that all services and collections be made available electronically, over mobile platforms. Since we do recognize that our resources are finite, rather than pandering to some groups at the expense of others with trendy temporal come-ons, why not instead focus on long-term services and collections that reflect our values? The patrons who really should matter most to us will respect us for this demonstration of our integrity. * Libraries are ecosystems. As with the rest of the world around us, libraries comprise arrays of interlocking, interdependent, and often poorly understood/ documented entities, services, and systems. They've developed that way over centuries. And just as so often happens in the larger world, any and every change we make can cause a cascade of countless other changes, many of which we might not anticipate before making that seemingly simple initial change. We are stewards of the libraries in which we work: our obligation, as librarians, is to respect what was bequeathed to us, to care for and use it wisely, and to pass it on to those who follow in at least the condition in which we received it--preferably better. Environments, including libraries, change and evolve of course, but critics of the supposedly slow pace of change in libraries fail to grasp that our role is just as much that of the conservationist as it is the advocate of development and change. Our mission is not change for change's sake; rather, it is incremental, considered change that will benefit not only today's patrons and librarians, but respect those of the past and serve those of the future as well. …