Thing 23--The Meaning of It All

Well, that's that. Things are looked at and commented on. Now we must blog about the meaning of it all. Is there one? I took the break week off to consider that, and I am not sure there is. The Things are all about the medium and not the message, and with due respect to R. Buckminster Fuller, the message is more important than the medium. Some may be driven by the desire to use new data diffusion tools to broaden our patron community. This should be encouraged because libraries are reliable sources for information, and if we can use some techie wonder to entice them to our websites and our buildings, how bad can that be?

Some Things have applications in-house. In a multi-branch library, many scheduling problems could be eliminated when a general staff meeting was held by recording it and letting shift workers watch it later in a podcast. People who didn't get all of what was said could revisit the session, and appropriate information could be provided so staff could ask follow-up questions. Other things like wikis and blogs have their uses, provided that they are kept current. There is no more excuse for dead links on a feature than there is for a mildewed book on a shelf. If a library's administration is sincere about technology, they need to spend the money to keep current. They should also collect usage statistics in order to decide which things are working for their patrons and which aren't, and letting the things that don't go away.

I've gotten some flak about wanting to regress to some glorious pre-tech age, mostly from people who assume that I'm against anything invented after the lever. This is nonsense. I am against the uncritical acceptance of everything that comes down the pike. I'm against the gadget envy that seems to afflict top administrators and their IT department heads. The director of Mallville PL would rather die than see Outlet City PL be a first adopter of the Next Big Thing and vice versa. Therefore their staffs often have the dubious joy of not only having to deal with an unproven and often unhelpful technology but they get to explain it to the patrons whom it has made unhappy. Oh, would I love it if those who say 'make it so' and wander off had to stay and make it work! At least Capt. Picard was wiling to get his hands dirty.

Let's not go overboard in any direction. After all, the technology that works in one community is a failure just down the Interstate, the same way that one library's best-seller is another's doorstop. Let's look at the various technical possibilities, experiment, and use the ones that work for our particular library and let the rest go. After all, there is more stuff coming along in a minute, and it might be something that would work well in our shop--and if not ours maybe in yours.

Farewell, gentle bloggers. I will soon diminish, go into the West, and remain Technoskeptic. And the blog will go away as soon as the technique can be mastered. It was fun while it lasted.

Thing 22--Staying Current

It is so sweet that 23 Things thinks that decisions on the addition of gadgets, widgets, and other -ets are driven by working librarians and paraprofessionals, so we must know every new thing that comes along. If only it were true. These choices are made away from the service desks, so it's not that necessary for front-line staff to be au courant with every New Thing. We're going to get what the higher levels want, and we'll learn enough of that to help patrons until the Next Big Thing comes along, whether it's Thing 24 or 124. Whether it works, whether anybody wants it, or whether anyone uses it is irrelevant. It is a system that has held since the memory of the bibliothecarius was replaced by a bound MS volume because the monk in charge of the scriptorium wanted to bug the one from the monastery over the hill and it won't change any time soon.

One pays a certain amount of attention to what is passing through the journals or on news sites, but it's not a good idea to assume that even if something looks useful, we'll get it because it has to be noticed by the journals first. Ironically, technical novelties, like slang, once they have been around long enough to be noticed by administrators, are frequently no longer novelties, having become either established techniques or hopelessly vieux jeux.