The User IS Not Broken! : get a new mindset!

The following text can be used to "brainwash" new library staff, library school students and in certain cases to give existing library staff a new "mindset" if they seem to be stuck in a 20th-Century mindset. Print these lines on a Virtual Librarian Trading Card and pass them around in Library World. They can be used as meditation Chant. Wake up and practice every morning. Gather your staff each morning around the coffee machine and chant for 5 minutes. Never leave the library if you haven't read them outloud at least once a day. These are the first lines:

• All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.
• You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.
• You are not a format. You are a service.
• The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.
• The user is the sun.
• The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.
• The user is not broken.
• Your system is broken until proven otherwise.
• That vendor who just sold you the million-dollar system because "librarians need to help people" doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, and his system is broken, too.
• Go and read the rest ...... http://freerangelibrarian.com/2006/06/the_user_is_not_broken_a_meme.php

Tags: user, environment, libraries, librarians, services,