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The illusion of stability; a library with a staff that can stay on top of what's working and what's breaking is a library that just might continue to look like a bedrock of stability to its users.

Article Excerpt
Change is nothing new in libraries. In many ways, change is what we're here for, in more ways than we care to discuss on most days. Many of our public libraries have seen rapid upticks in usage counts as the U.S. economy struggles, while time-honored usage counts in academic libraries still head downward. When there aren't many places to turn, we can still turn to libraries to help find work, to learn new skills, to enrich ourselves, to connect with others, and to spend time safely when there aren't enough other places to do that. We've been doing these things in libraries for so long that it can seem like as the world changes around us, libraries have been one of the few reliable constants in our lives.

But we know better than that. Even if libraries seem like constants--I know I've been in and around them my whole life-they change dramatically all the time. We can jump back through just a handful of generations and recall the drastic changes in libraries. A generation ago, most people you know had never sent an email, and the web hadn't started yet. A generation before that, most people had never used a computer. A generation before that, this country was shaken by economic disaster and war (sound familiar?). Go back another generation or two, and lending libraries were still a fairly new idea.

We know about the constant churn in libraries, the ever-changing technologies, the information habits of our clientele, the simultaneous simultaneous increases and decreases in usage, and the shifting demographics of our supporting communities, so let's not kid ourselves about the latest and greatest tools we use to deliver our services. When we're running our own web servers and when we're using tools out in the internet cloud like the latest social networks, these systems change constantly too. Those changes affect us more as we grow to depend upon them more. Your favorite new service from a web startup company might disappear overnight along with your data, say, or a change in Facebook's...

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