She Turned Me Into a Newt*

So there’s this tension in the library world between pragmatics and theory. In library school, the professional blogosphere, ALA, and the like, the focus is on theory and trends. Cool ideas. Freedom of information and the importance of an educated citizenry in a democracy. The latest technologies. Things like that. But most of that has very little to do with the day-to-day operation of libraries, and it’s easy to wonder whether any of it matters. Some of the best librarians I’ve known, in fact, haven’t been to library school, but they know everything about their locations and are all about the patrons. It’s easy from that perspective to question the relevance of all the theoretical talk. Especially, in my experience, in light of the approach taken by the majority of our patrons. In their eyes we are rarely an essential service but a recreational one. They might miss us as essential if we were gone, but the vast majority of users come to the library in their spare time looking for leisure activities. Just look to the Captain’s recent post about helping a patron with a hardcore information question for once instead of just putting a hold on the latest best seller. Circulation in our system has increased dramatically in recent years with the circ department struggling to keep up while reference interactions have steadily dropped. So I get the professional discussions and enjoy entering into them as much as anyone, but as I do so I always wonder in the back of my head if we’re missing something. How much should we try to shape our communities and how much should we let ourselves be shaped by them? Where in that continuum should we fall?

*I got better