I reject your notion that if I am somehow not embracing the Rah-Rah Librarianship model I am somehow doing Librarianship wrong. The buggywhip makers 100 years ago could have been rah rah Optimism through the roof and they STILL would not have made it beyond the 1930s. This is not about optimisim nor pessimism; this is about reality. And today the reality of the situation is quite a bit removed from the ideality of the root philosophy of “librarianship.”

Librarianship is nothing more than the position of a librarian, which historically has been a position that serves a role in connecting patron with information. Today that role has been superceded in a large part by the accesibility of the internet in general and google in specific. What unique value we once had has been vastly diminished; this is our reality! It is not BAD librarianship to state reality!

I could still have some optimisim if there were only a few failures; now tell me what I am supposed to do when the few failures are multiplied by a couple hundred! Do I need to mention the specific failures of library budgets or the failures of library organizations to properly project the future demand for librarians?

Mr. Lankes is doing something, but there is yet to be little to no proof that doing something is better than doing nothing when the value of something is already doubtable…

The saying “You’re just Spinning your wheels” comes to mind. I seem to remember a high school teacher who drove his car off the road into a large mudhole. He would have been better off doing nothing. But instead, he did something; He put the car into gear and pressed down the gas. He got all the way up to third gear when the tires caught the ground quite suddenly. Instead of the car rocketing forward, the entire drivetrain instantaneously erupted into a pile of twisted wrecked parts, all the way form the engine to the back axle and everything in between.

There is no proof that doing Something when the future is unknown is any better than doing Nothing. Indeed, if you do Nothing, you may save yourself a lifetime in wasted energy and in the process find an endeavor elsewhere that actually leads to Something worthwhile.

I have NO doubt that he’s adding a lot more to the profession then the whiners and naysayers who seem to have nothing better to do all day then read AL and write excessively long comments.

What have you done that was of benefit to the library profession, lately?

librarianship? ur doing it wrong

quartz dot syr dot edu slash rdlankes slash blog

The funnier part is how Library Journal, an organization that pulls $149 per member each year or so, has a technology interface that is so soundly trodden by organizations that are free to all.

Wasn’t Me, that was my post as well;

The point here is not that this is the movies and we’re in real life. The point here is that this is that the media outlets are a direct reflection of the society that produces them. In this case, see a reflection of modern search behavior Expectations – everything is on Google.

I also sat through Twilight – and I was equally intrigued with how Belle did her research on the vampire occult. She uses a combination of Google and Amazon to find a local bookstore. She did not check her materials out; she bought them.

These cinematography events are merely drops in the bucket, of course, but in each case we see modern society using anything but the library to do their information research. The current public mindset appears to be that everything can be found on Google and second, when you need a book, you get it from a Bookstore or from the Amazon Network. The library and all of it’s information resources seemingly don’t exist. That is the issue that concerns me.