The Challenge Ahead

This little book would be doing you the reader a disservice if I did not try my best fulfill the title, Devil's Advocate. Now in the next few pages, I am going to talk about a couple of issues that may be looked upon as very critical, but these criticisms do not make my observations any less honest. The first of these is the idea that sometimes we employ certain practices at the library level without thinking about the repercussions. This means that sometimes libraries make the decision, especially with technology, to do things because they can, but never address the question as to whether they should do that.  

 Many of these practices came to my attention attending conferences like state library conferences, Internet Librarian, and Computers in Libraries. I would sit there in astounded disbelief as I listened to various libraries wax poetic on their latest ideas. For example, I remember one program on eBooks spoke about Calibre and how you could use this product to strip the DRM copyright protection on an ebook. Although the speaker said, I am not telling you to use this. The message sent loud and clear was: I am going to show you exactly how this works and if anything gets back to me; I know nothing about it.  Another example was a program that spoke about how their library converted YouTube videos into downloadable video files for kids to put on their Powerpoint presentations. I do not know, but does that violate copyright in some way? I would venture a guess that if an action even comes within a football field of copyright violation; you should probably not do it. I know there are those who will say that fair use is in play here, but can you really take that chance? To recap, the first reason to not do something technology-wise is that it could be seen as possibly just plain wrong.  The next observation emerges in libraries that jump on a bandwagon before we are even sure that it is a bandwagon worth jumping on. Early in 2012, Pinterest exploded and everyone began to say that it is the next Facebook. Let's be clear. It was not the next Facebook, not even close. The idea behind it seemed interesting, but many questions still remained. Despite these questions, libraries began to offer training sessions on it. I found this to be incredibly quick as it was still in beta making memberships hard to come by sometimes. As I have noticed now, the initial excitement over Pinterest has slowed down to a crawl. Another example of bandwagon jumping comes with the example of Windows Vista. I am sure many libraries trusted that Microsoft would not issue another version so quickly after purchasing Vista. This is another example of being a little patient and not saying to  yourself, I want to be the first anywhere. Vista was adequate, but everyone very quickly found out that it was flawed. I know you will say that it does not matter for libraries with places like Tech Soup. Yes, this is true. Yet, that should not stop us from looking back at a situation to reconsider the fact as to whether we jumped the gun  on a product or service. Where do situations like this leave us librarians? I think that we need to show patience and dilligence when deciding to offer anything up for the public. This means anything from a new service for our patrons to sharing information with our colleagues. I was reminded of this when we received our license for the Freegal Music Service. We were made very aware of certain statements we could say about Sony and certain statements we were not allowed to say in our press releases. If any lesson can be gained from this, dot all your I's, cross all your T's, and do a little research before jumping into the deep end of the pool.