The Price We Pay…

March 13th, 2006

Those who don’t deal with the world outside fo librarianship on a professional level usually don’t hear comments like this often. For those of us that blog about and work beyond the four walls (virtual or otherwise), we are constantly ridiculed. Most of it is comical, but sometimes it can be brutal. I find myself defending librarianship many times during the course of a week. And don’t get me started when I go to non-librarian events. Do you know how many times I’ve head, “A librarian? At a start-up?”

Adam Green, who I will meet at OPML Camp next month (a get-together that I am really excited about), has a few words about librarians. Surely, it was in jest, but at the root of all jokes lies some form of the truth, a suffocating scab waiting to be picked at until the wound breaths. If you didn’t click on the link above yet, here are a few quotes for your reading pleasure:

“Another unexpected source of Web innovation is librarians. Don’t get me wrong, I like librarians. I worked in libraries from Junior High School straight through college. It is just that next to accountants, librarians are the last group of people I would expect to jump into new technologies.”

…

“[T]ags are the opposite of a hierarchy. They are a user generated form of anarchy. Every user may have a different tag for the same idea, and may even spell or pluralize it differently. It’s the virtual equivalent of letting users pull the books off the shelves and throw them in big piles. After all those years reshelving books, just thinking about it gives me stomach cramps. Librarians adopting tagging is like capitalists adopting Open Source.”

I love that last line. Don’t bother commenting on his blog because he hasn’t enabled comments. For shame…

Adam also thinks that librarians throw fun parties at conferences. They aren’t bad. Most of the good parties at library conferences that I’ve been to have happened when a bunch of us just get together on a whim, let our hair down (heh!) and, well, drink like the rest of humanity. Well, there was that one in Chicago.

Adam, the PLA Conference is in Boston next week. Stop by and I’ll try to show you a good time…

Comments are closed.