Synechdoche

I was going to write about The Darien Statements, but I find myself distracted by one point and unable to focus on the whole.

“As librarians we must:” one section begins (less than grammatically), and below it are bullet points. The one, in particular, that’s got my attention? “Choose wisely what to stop doing.”

Whoa.

It resonates on a personal level, certainly, but looking at it as advice for the profession at large, I can’t help thinking of Steve Martin’s “How to be a millionaire without paying taxes” joke. I mean, any advice that begins “choose wisely” is probably not specific enough to be helpful. How should we choose? How can we know? Should we leave Second Life because it is clearly not going to be the paradigm-changing phenomenon its creators might have hoped? Or do we keep doing it, as training for the next big technology? How can we know whether text-a-librarian will catch on, unless we try it? Are institutional repositories the big fix we need for scholarly communication and archiving of the scholarly record, or are they a flash in the pan? (Trust me on this: one can find papers that say both. … And I should wrap up this post and get back to my paper.)

How do you determine what is the “wise” point to give up on any given initiative or technology?

For that matter, how funny is it that I immediately jumped to technology, as the context in which that question operates? I can think of several others, but I did not, immediately.

It’s a question worth thinking about and discussing–good on them for bringing it up!