Rick Anderson on future library services

I recently wrote to Rick Anderson to comment on his DuPage presentation Always a River, Sometimes a Library. He brings up many excellent points in this telecast and I highly recommend it. He states flatly that libraries are "broken" and need a new mindset. He emphasizes the need to provide our patrons with the services they want instead of "religiously" following our past practices. I particularly appreciated two things: he says we should start by questioning our values (he specifically mentioned ALA's Core Values) and that the future is "online, online, online." I'm also happy to report that he has started a blog titled Shusher. I think it will be worth keeping an eye on.

I also sent him my whitepaper and he kindly read it and provided some very thoughtful comments:

"...I really like your points about the importance of looking for opportunities in hosting and even publishing original content. For some reason, your comments made me think about when I first started writing CD reviews; I was writing for the local daily newspaper in Provo, Utah, and I remember going in one day to pick up some CDs and noticing a clipping that the editor had put up on the bulletin board. It was a magazine story about the fact that successful newspapers are generally those that demonstrate 'an almost slavish devotion to local news.' (I don't know why that exact phrase has stuck with me, but it has.)

Your paper brought that point to my mind again. I wonder if the same thing won't be true of successful libraries in the (near) future: in addition to providing easy, transparent access to functionally unlimited amounts of high-quality third-party content, perhaps the most successful libraries will be those that also work tirelessly to facilitate the development, management and distribution of high-quality local content. After all, it's no less absurd for a library to be a publisher than it is for a publisher to be an archive. In both cases, the new role has little to do with the historical role, but so what? History is history. What matters is what's coming ahead, and I suspect that what's coming ahead is going to force us either to grapple with completely new functions and roles, or to go out of business."

Yes, perhaps in the future the successful libraries will have an almost slavish devotion to local digital collections...