He Speaks the Truth
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Librarians, Libraries & the Profession. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 13th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I worked in an academic library that allowed any state resident use the library. Once, a young man checked out 20 books and ended up in jail before bringing them back. The books, of course, never came back. Many people then wanted to create a rule limiting the number of books non-faculty, staff, or students could check out. I managed to dissuade them by asking if this was something that happened enough to warrant such a rule. It, of course, did not.
IT departments do this also: create pre-emptive rules: It’s not a problem yet, let’s keep it from being a problem. Oppressive protectionism.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Since today is the [unofficial] Blogger Appreciation Day, I wanted to say a quick “THANKS” for writing. I am reading and thinking about what you wrote.
Working in a school environment we see rules created for the most bizarre things. Who writes these? Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror screenwriters?
April 16th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Why do we create rules where we don’t really need them? To cover our butts, I guess. As institutions (schools in particular) become more and more open to criticism from the public, administrators find it much easier to create a rule ahead of time to show people that at least something was done to try to prevent whatever from happening, than it is to defend their apparent unpreparedness after the fact. I blame this on the lack of good education and patience on the part of the public, and laziness or increased workload on the part of the institutions and their administrators.
Just a thought.