Unlike many, the Loon is actually rather bullish on librarians (for purposes of this post defined as “MLS-trained information professionals”) in academe. All those research data aren’t going to manage themselves, and all those undergraduates won’t learn to think their way around Google alone and unguided.
Some days, honestly, she’s a great roaring bear on actual academic libraries, and the larger and more bureaucratized they are, the more bearish the Loon is on them. She regrets this. She’d like not to be. The fiddling-while-Rome-is-disrupted just keeps happening, though.
Voilà. Innovation in libraries will be fostered by a whole lot of librarians paying a whole lot of money to sit on their tail-feathers in a traditionally-organized conference setting, watching traditionally-constituted talks and workshops oriented toward the back-patting, status-quo–fostering “how we done it good” genre.
The Loon is not amused.
Make no mistake, the Loon is all in favor of innovation in academic librarianship. She’s just entirely sure it doesn’t happen at traditionally-constituted conferences. She has strong opinions about why academic libraries don’t innovate as much as they could or should, too, but they’re generally the sort of opinion that would give traditionally-constituted conferences the traditional vapors. (The Loon is an incorporeal pseudonym for good reason, after all.)
Oh, academic librarianship. Surely we can do better than this. Surely. By all means let’s start by innovating our conferences, hm?
Innovation by… sitting on one’s tail-feathers by Library Loon, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.