Here's a future vision about Our Partnerships from the Vision 2015 report:  "As an inspiration for the future, the Library's unique expertise and partnerships with authors, teachers, and even bookstores, encourages people of all ages with an interest in doing so to develop the skills and discipline to write and publish literary works, from more traditional forms of "books" to graphic novels and beyond." (p.19)

If I didn't know better, I'd think that the authors of this report are unaware of the digital revolution that has been going on now for a decade or more! Our future partnerships with the literary output of our communities is bound to be digital! Future authors are today's children. They're growing up digital. The lowest-barrier, lowest-cost publishing medium is digital. The authors may feel that the "beyond" in their sentence encompasses all possible digital formats, but that's not good enough. Since the web is already revolutionizing the ability of people to communicate with their community (not to mention, to form new communities), a Vision for 2015 (or for any time in the future) has to acknowledge that.

I just had to get that off my chest

Just spent three exhausting days at our annual provincial library conference: BCLA 2009.

We brought Marie Radford out from Rutgers University for two sessions about VR, reference quality, and her recent research about patrons perceptions of reference. That was excellent.

They also had Michael Stephens  as the Plenary speaker. I certainly hope his Hyperlinked Library presentation made an impression on those who need to be impressed. That's not a backhanded-complement. What I mean is that for some segment of the audience, much of what Michael says is what we already understand and seeing his presentation is energizing and affirming, if nothing else. But for an unfortunately large and powerful segment of the population, it's what they need to understand. I just hope that they'll eventually get it. 

As for me and my long, drawn-out attempt to Respond to the VPL Vision 2015 document, BCLA just emphasized that whatever detailed prescriptive suggestions I write about will likely no longer be the latestd greatest buy the time I've finished writing but, by the same token, we need to push risk-averse, digital-averse libraries harder to meet their new patrons needs with new services so I'd better hiring up and get this over with (and move on to the next thing).