Tyler Rousseau, over at the Library Garden blog, posted an entry yesterday, Librarian 2.0 - The new professional or the responsible one? In this post, he reacts to my Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto by calling it "both an inspring and a frustrating read."

In expressing his frustration, Rousseau asks, "Why do we have professional librarians who refuse to keep up with the professional and technological requirements? How did we reach a point where the patrons’ needs were less important than the traditional way of doing things?"

I've been thinking about this, myself. I've come up with three reasons to explain why the librarian profession has, as a whole, fallen behind the times. I'd rather look at systemic reasons than ask why individuals within the profession are making the choices that they do, though of course the two are closely linked.

I'm not contending that my three reasons are the only answers to Rousseau's questions. In fact, I'm interested in hearing how others would answer Rousseau. And I don't like to be negative. It's always better to take a positive approach - to look for solutions rather than emphasize the problems. But a look at source problems does help in finding solutions. It can also help us to understand ourselves.

In any case, here are my three reasons.

1. Our culture of optionalities. I've already blogged about this notion, so I won't say much about it here. Essentially: while our choices as individual institutions bring strength to the profession, at some point a lack of coherent, profession-wide, aspirational standards is holding us back. As a profession, and even among peer institutions, we are without meaningful standards. Without industry-wide agreement on where we need to be, a culture of optionality can thrive.

2. 2.0 is a great leap. I'm of the opinion that the leap from 0.0 to 1.0 was a less significant one than the leap from 1.0 to 2.0. Why? When we first moved from card catalogs to OPACs, and from paper handouts to Gopher and then Web sites, we were changing media but not our relationship with users. We were (and pretty much still are) doing it "my way." We had total control. It was our material, our input, our world. I've come to the conclusion that this is a very comfortable place for most librarians to be. (I don't mean to imply that only librarians are comfortable here, but hey, this is a librarian's blog.) I think it's much more difficult to let users into our spaces as active participants. Let them modify our Web pages? tag our catalog records? blog their opinions about us? mash up our content on other sites? This is a far more radical proposition than putting our content online and under our control.

3. The speed of change. Simply put, 2.0 has come along quite rapidly. This is hardly news, but it's worth thinking about. Can we cut ourselves some slack? Much of what we see as dominant now in the 2.0 world didn't exist just a few years ago. While we are a creative profession, we are not necessarily entrepreneurs. Harnessing rapidly evolving 2.0 change on a systems level takes more than we often have by way of staff, know-how, infrastructure, funding, and so on. In some respects, I don't think we should be too hard on ourselves. On the other hand, there is a law of diminishing returns if we continue to hold back as time goes by.

So these are my three answers to Rousseau's questions.