New column!
That said, I must comment on some threads of conversation I had at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Las Vegas. In 2006, I wrote a post at Tame the Web (TTW) entitled “Five Phrases I Hope I Never Hear in Libraries Again.” It got a lot of traction back then, during the heyday of LIS blogging, and I used a slide of the phrases for many years in presentations. One of the phrases was: We’ve always done it this way.
Back then I wrote, “I think it’s time to red flag any utterance of that phrase in our libraries and make sure it’s not just an excuse to avoid change. It may, however, be the best way to do something.” I urged readers to explore alternatives and new ways of working to make sure efficiencies couldn’t be improved. I cautioned: if librarians are hiding behind that phrase because they’ve had enough new things or just want to keep things the same, it might be time to move on. Is it anxiety that puts up these barriers?