Library world, new trends, technologies

"[...]there are more than a few ways to kill a library.

For example:

√ Stop believing in the libraries mission. Do we really believe in the freedom to read, learn and discover?

√ Spend less time with the board. The ideal public library board would meet 4 times per year and agrees with everything the CEO recommended.

√ Stop talking to your customers. What do they know any way? And on the same topic, stop consulting staff. It is a huge time waster.

√ Don’t worry about the future and how you will get there. Sustainability is not an issue with which libraries need to be concerned. After all, we’ve have survived for hundreds of years.

√ Stop telling the library story. Everyone has heard our story.

√ Accept that the library building is old and you don’t need to keep renovating, painting, and updating it. It is what it is.

√ Accept that just like instant coffee killed the coffee bean, the e-book will kill the printed book.

√ Stop promoting the product; everyone knows about literacy and lifelong learning.

√ Stop empowering staff, and stop training them. They should come to us fully trained.

√ Stop all this talk about innovation. It just makes for more work.

√ And, for heaven’s sake, stop changing the rules and our traditions. It’s annoying!"

by Lisa Chau:

Heather Backman 

"She discusses here how technology such as e-books affected the library:

In one sense, e-books have changed very little about what libraries do or how we do it; they just allow us to deliver a basic library service in a different medium. Some people have said that e-books are “killing” the printed book or that they spell the end of libraries, but that hasn’t been my experience. To my mind, the e-book is not “killing” the printed book, just supplementing it. We are still buying physical books in large quantities and I expect that we will continue to do so for a long time. I would go so far as to say that I doubt the physical book will ever completely go away. Even if it does, libraries are more about information-sharing than about lending physical items; handling e-books may mean changes in some of our procedures but I don’t think that libraries will cease to exist when the e-book predominates."