The Emperor has no clothes
Recently, Dorothea Salo delivered a blistering critique of library-created institutional repositories. Her basic point is that our IR service model is driven by a failed ideology, we ignore peoples’ real needs, our tools are hopeless, and we don’t deal with funding or other practical considerations in a realistic way. In addition, she charges us librarians with not eating our own dog food since we do not do what we try to convince others to do. In two words — we suck.
What has been interesting is the response to Dorothea’s comments. A lot of people are glad she’s speaking up.
I believe in emphasizing the positive, but I’m glad to see our profession might finally be getting ready for an open discussion on how we can move things forward. We do many good things, but our profession has a disturbing habit of pretending we are dizzy with success when we are reeling from spectacular failures.
The “how we done it good” articles and presentations that permeate our professional communications are not harmless. I once let a journal editor talk me into putting a positive spin on a method I used in one of my own projects and originally reported to be unworkable. A couple years later, I learned the article was required reading in a library school class — a student contacted me wanting more detail so she could copy my method. I’ve been asked to put a positive spin on sections of several other writing projects when my assessments of methods, services, or products were less than glowing.
We need to recognize our limitations. As a profession, we pretend we can solve more than we can. We cannot compete with companies like Google, Amazon, or a number of others on their own turf. If we make pathetic attempts to mimic these services, our users will simply ignore us. We must accept that some companies perform certain tasks far better than we will ever be able to and adjust our services accordingly.
At the same time, we need to not be afraid of taking risks or let past failures make us fearful of decisive action. The only way to succeed is to try. Most things worth shooting for are hard, so logically, there should be many failures. Rather than pretend they are successes, we should learn from them and move on.