Comments on: Marketing Malpractice http://dltj.org/article/marketing-malpractice/ We're Disrupted, We're Librarians, and We're Not Going to Take It Anymore Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:48:39 +0000 hourly 1 By: the jesterhttp://dltj.org/article/marketing-malpractice/comment-page-1/#comment-2739 the jester Wed, 09 Aug 2006 02:08:33 +0000 http://dltj.org/?p=3#comment-2739 Thanks for the comments, Fred -- I agree with your assessment and that of David on Catalogablog. Still, it is hard not to build the cages thinking that we are acting in the patron's best interest...I think I fall into that trap at times.Thanks, too, for reminding me that I had not yet written about why Clayton Christensen's work is important to figuring out the present and the future of libraries. (The reminder to myself was in the first line of this post from last year -- and I still haven't gotten to it yet!) Thanks for the comments, Fred — I agree with your assessment and that of David on Catalogablog. Still, it is hard not to build the cages thinking that we are acting in the patron’s best interest…I think I fall into that trap at times.

Thanks, too, for reminding me that I had not yet written about why Clayton Christensen’s work is important to figuring out the present and the future of libraries. (The reminder to myself was in the first line of this post from last year — and I still haven’t gotten to it yet!)

]]> By: Fredhttp://dltj.org/article/marketing-malpractice/comment-page-1/#comment-2602 Fred Thu, 03 Aug 2006 23:41:25 +0000 http://dltj.org/?p=3#comment-2602 I like this. It reminds me of Roy Tennant's admonition that only librarian's like to search; everyone else likes to find.Another interesting analog can be found at http://bloglines.com/preview?siteid=1143&itemid=1578, in which the author muses thusly:"Imagine you are building a steak-house. One thing you need are steak-knives. However, patrons could attack each other with them. So you build your steak-house to keep all diners separated from one another by cages. No one can get hurt.How often do we build just such systems? Allowing users to tag bib records? They might put in the seven forbidden words. User reviews linked to bib records. What if they write slander and the library gets sued? How often do we picture the very worst that could happen and then destroy our systems due to that remote possibility? Yet, Wikipedia, Amazon, et al. seem to survive. Maybe we could also."I think it always comes back to the obvious, which is that we are servant librarians, whose primary responsibility is to make it easier (if not easy) to get our patrons/customers/users to the information they need. I like this. It reminds me of Roy Tennant’s admonition that only librarian’s like to search; everyone else likes to find.

Another interesting analog can be found at http://bloglines.com/preview?siteid=1143&itemid=1578, in which the author muses thusly:

“Imagine you are building a steak-house. One thing you need are steak-knives. However, patrons could attack each other with them. So you build your steak-house to keep all diners separated from one another by cages. No one can get hurt.

How often do we build just such systems? Allowing users to tag bib records? They might put in the seven forbidden words. User reviews linked to bib records. What if they write slander and the library gets sued? How often do we picture the very worst that could happen and then destroy our systems due to that remote possibility? Yet, Wikipedia, Amazon, et al. seem to survive. Maybe we could also.”

I think it always comes back to the obvious, which is that we are servant librarians, whose primary responsibility is to make it easier (if not easy) to get our patrons/customers/users to the information they need.

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