A recent Wall Street Journal article, "Of the Places You’ll Go,
Is the Library Still One of Them?," has been bandied about quite a bit on the blogosphere and in e-mail galore. The article is quite full of hype and unjustified generalizations, but the fact that it was written in the first place is the thing to to think about. The most poignant commentary on the article in my opinion came from John Blyberg in his post Didn’t I Just?.
From his post:
I’m afraid to say that delayed gratification is not something we can
sell and traditional notions of “attention” have been shattered–we are
no longer entitled to have our youth “pay” attention. We need to earn their attention. The sooner we realize that, the better.
I don’t know that we ever were entitled to anyone’s attention here at the library. I think we’ve always had to fight for it, but in the days of 2-day book deliveries from Amazon and search engines with "instant" access to a lot of information, it seems that our competition got a lot stiffer. We need to speed up our delivery services of all materials–electronic and print. We need to provide e-services that are relevant to our users and can be accessed and used with the speed they expect from the rest of the world. The fact that what we have is more reliable, exact, and thorough will then be all the more valued in comparison to the other fast but unreliable resources they use.
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