There seems to be some small protest over my last post, where I said libraries have civic functions and can't be run like businesses and aren't the high tech, high stress environments of big corporations, or something like that. Whatever I said. Anyway, there was a voice of protest from "Stressed out public librarian": "public libraries are governed by taxpayers in cities with huge budget deficits. Their staff is being cut because libraries are lower on the totem pole than police and fire services. In the meantime those larger numbers of unemployed people coming to libraries are being served by smaller and smaller staffs. If you think that makes for a low-stress environment I invite you to work a day at my reference desk." I'll decline the offer to work at your reference desk, but not because of the stress. Perhaps it's all relative, but let's be honest. How stressful is library work? So staff is being cut because libraries are considered less important than ...
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So I mention a management guru I've never heard of and suddenly I'm besieged by him. A kind reader sent me the link to yet another Seth Godin piece, this one in Time Magazine's vapid feature on the "Future of Work." (The link was accompanied by one to this humorous skewering of said feature, if you're interested.) This sort of business prediction tripe is beloved of some librarians, including some librarians who might try to force their intentions upon you, so it might be worth checking out to arm yourself against the enemy. As Sun Tzu says in the Art of War...actually, I have no idea what he says, since I haven't read it, but there's probably something appropriate there. According to Time and their hardy band of prognosticators, in the future, work will be high tech, highly stressful, highly conditional, poorly compensated, and completely dispensable, with no perks, no benefits, and no chance of retirement. Yay! That is, if you have do the kind of "work" Time ...
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"If you don't oppose change then you cannot be one of the Annoyed Librarian Acolytes." That's my nomination for oddest comment of the week. (Perhaps I'll make this a new weekly feature instead of my planned serialization of a mystery novel entitled Death of the Annoyed Librarian, in which a librarian is murdered during ALA in Chicago, and because of her noted sharp wit and lack of sensible shoes she is immediately recognized as the Annoyed Librarian. Investigation of twopointopians and regressive librarians follows!) But back to the odd comment. What would it mean to "oppose change"? Or are we speaking loosely here, as in those people who claim they want to "stop climate change"? (Um, yeah, good luck with that. If you do stop it, could you stop it around 70 degrees, with low humidity and a light breeze? Thanks!) Criticizing someone for "opposing change" is a steady tactic of the frustrated trendsetters. "The AL is against change!" ...
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Some say you can lead the AL to a martini, but you can't make her drink. That, however, is false. You can always make her drink, but you can't lead her to the martini. That's because the Annoyed Librarian cannot be lead. Also, it's the AL and a martini. They'll get together somehow. Some librarians want to lead us all, or maybe they just want to be lead. They're the ones who get all excited about marketing and management. The ones who give us motivational talks about how wonderful the world would be if we all just bowed down to their dubious genius. The ones who watch talks like this one (found via this blog , which is so HOT this week!). It's 17 minutes of someone called Seth Godin "on the tribes we lead," and is offered, I suppose, for our inspiration. The video is 17 minutes, but I read the accompanying transcript in about 3, so you might consider doing that if you can tolerate it. However, I have sacrificed myself so you don't have to. And yes, you got that right, I ...
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I always find it amusing that anyone "fears" libraries. It makes me feel so powerful! Cruising one of my favorite sites for AL fodder, I came across this argument that libraries shouldn't be allowed to have e-books. The author is a digital publisher , and he doesn't think his New Zealand public libraries should be allowed to lend commercially available e-books, because then no one would buy them. Uh huh. His bio says he "has been involved in the publishing, technology and internet [sic] fields for more than 20 years" and "has been involved with the internet [sic] almost as long as Al Gore." That quip about Al Gore would have been slightly amusing, oh, say, ten years ago. He's about as up to date on his political jokes as he is about libraries. There's a bit more rumination about these new-fangled times we're living in. "After all, in this digital age, is there really any public good justification for making vast numbers of books available free, in ...
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By now most of you have probably heard the news that several years ago Elsevier published a fake academic journal - the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine - that was basically a marketing ploy financed by Merck. So what looked like a peer-reviewed scholarly journal was in fact a collection of articles showing how great Merck is. Now it's come out that there were five more titles in the "Australasian Fake Journals" series published around the same time. Elsevier won't say who "sponsored" those, but since it has to be an entity with lots of money and no scruples that has something to do with healthcare, it's probably a pharmaceutical company. Some librarians are outraged or annoyed by this, and not just the usual gang of library idiots (though there are plenty of those), but at least one response from a librarian whose writings and opinion I respect. The problem with the outraged response is that it's based on faulty assumptions. People seem to think ...
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