Aaron Schmidt asked some folks “What are the most important things on which libraries should be working?” (No preposition dangler, he!) He asked them to limit their response to three sentences, and got some interesting replies.

I kept turning this question over in my mind and came up with my own three ideas. I think I got away from “things on which to work” and moved over to “rules of thumb,” or something. I’m sure if I kept thinking, I’d change my three, but here they are as they exist in my mind right now:

Exploit diverse networks of libraries and librarians rather than seeking to create monolithic groups. Pursue openness whenever possible. Keep asking yourself and your users “how can we help our users kick ass?”

Since this is my own blog, I’ll grant myself a little more room to explain.

• Exploit diverse networks of libraries and librarians rather than seeking to create monolithic groups. Stephen Downes writes about this kind of thing a lot (take a look at this whiteboard for starters), and while I don’t know that I’d agree with everything he’s written on the subject, I do think that we will have more success in coming up with ways for lots of people or libraries to cooperate in their own way (as with interlibrary loan) than in trying to get many people or institutions to move in lockstep (as with collaborative collection development)

• Pursue openness whenever possible. Yes, I’m still thinking about yesterday’s post. Open source, open content, etc. aren’t always possible. Users are going to demand content that isn’t free to rip, mix, and burn, and sometimes vendors’ proprietary systems will be superior to what we can offer with free open source software. But the less locked in we are to proprietary software, data, and the like, the better off we will be, and the better we will be able to serve users.

• Keep asking yourself and your users “how can we help our users kick ass?” That comes, of course, from the great blog Creating Passionate Users, specifically the post Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide. I confess, I need to do this much more myself: ask all the time “how is what I’m doing right now helping users succeed?” “How would this new thing help users kick ass at whatever it is they are doing?” “Just what exactly does kicking ass entail for my students/faculty/public/employees?”

I could come up with others, probably having to do with making less-crummy interfaces or hiding complexity by making more intelligent systems. But this is what I came up with in the shower, and I’m sticking with it!