My head is spinning from reading some of those librarians we were asked to read for week six. Usually, when I hear talk like that, it's somebody trying to sell me a monorail, or seventy-six trombones, or something. These libraries of the future sound wonderful, but I just have one question: where are we going to find human beings worthy of them?
You are no doubt familiar with the work of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. One of my favourite Charles Addams multi-panel cartoons (which I can't find online), shows a gloomy, decrepit old gothic mansion in a street of otherwise modern buildings. A hoarding goes up: "Soon to be constructed on this site, modern office building, etc." In the dead of night, a sinister vampire-like figure leaves the old building, with a bundle of possessions. The old building is torn down and the gleaming, modern new building is erected. Then, in the final panel, again in the dead of night, we see the vampire quietly entering the new building, carrying his bundle.
I tell this story because it makes a very good point, which I can duplicate from my own experience. In the days before my library was extensively modernised, among our regulars was an extremely ancient and tottery couple, the husband of which would spend the whole of every day reading lawbooks (no doubt preparing to right some ancient wrong he had suffered), while his wife sat patiently in idle attendance.
Then we closed the reading room, remodelled it, and re-opened it - brand spanking new, massed arrays of glowing computer screens like the bridge of the Discovery. We seemed to have inaugurated a new era of librarianship. And who were the first people to walk through the door? The ancient tottery couple.
Have I made my point?
1 comment:
Good point...and we have to be very careful that the technology we intorduce into our libraries doesn't scare these people. They still need to see the human side of our service
Post a Comment