For a possible research project, I’m reading around in the historical library literature about change in libraries. Here’s a great quote from John Berry in a Library Journal editorial from 10/15/83 about the first LITA conference:
The usual band of cheerleaders delivered typical, often condescending, pleas for everyone to get on this or that automation bandwagon, and the usual “experts” delivered typical indictments of working librarians who offered any resistance to the cosmic imperatives of the new age.
I’m trying to get an idea of just how long hyperbolic change rhetoric in librarianship has generated a specific kind of criticism, not of the change, but of the rhetoric. Now I know it’s been at least 30 years.
To make matters worse, change rhetoricians often borrow meaningless jargon from Silicon Valley and the private section. Thus ‘paradigms’ shift, ‘scaffolds’ are erected to uncertain purpose, everything is either ‘reframed’ or viewed through one ‘framework’ or another…
*sector