[WEB4LIB] RE: Seeing ourselves as others see us

[K.G. Schneider]

> profession; to refer to but the most obvious, how many of us can lay
> claim to a work that has been even fractionally as influential to
> librarianship as has AACR2?

You know, I was anticipating this response, since I've heard it so often.
but I guess it makes me an aging next-gen to finally say what I think
whenever I hear this statement, which is that AACR2 may be an
accomplishment, but as important as it is, it's an accomplishment in a tool
designed around yesteryear's concepts of information organization. 

Also, to make this argument logical, let's see what I said. I said the
editorial was not helpful in projecting an image of our profession. (The
editorial was not about AACR2, and in fact I'm sure no newspaper ever has or
ever will publish an editorial about AACR2.) I would go even farther and say
that to the extent that our profession has "branches," and one of the
branches is information technology, the editorial misrepresented what many
librarians say and think about Google Print. And the sad part there is many
of us have intelligent things to say about Google Print, but we are
represented... in print... by our worst stereotype, in which we appear
resistant and deaf to new information technologies. It's too bad, because
the media seems just as open to other images when we pitch them. 

Also, saying so-and-so was president of LITA no more convinces me of that
person's relevance to modern information science than saying that someone
got elected to the White House so he must know what he's doing. If you said,
"...and look at what so and so did for the ALA website!" or "...and now look
how we podcast executive board meetings!" or "...and now we have our own
manned virtual-reference spaceship!" or even "...and what cunningly
insightful comments he made about Google Print!" Well, then I'd be
impressed. 

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com