Monday, January 30, 2012

Acquire. Distribute. Archive. Repeat.

This is the role of the library as I see it.

Acquire.

We acquire materials. We acquire experts. We acquire technology.

Distribute.

We lend materials. We make experts available as full and part-time paid employees, contracted performers and presenters, volunteers, and other paid and unpaid services that connect library customers to experts in real time or as recorded media. We reserve time for users to have access to technology, tools, objects, digital files, physical space, virtual space, etc.

Archive.

We buy or lease materials for long-term use. We store what we can. We record events through various media, as images, video, audio, text, and original objects. We preserve for future users.

Repeat.

And we do this again, and again, and again.

Pretty simple. Anything I missed?

1 comment:

  1. I want to say it's more complicated than that, but I can't.

    ReplyDelete