I think it just portrays the author’s frustration. Using a less meaningful word would make it less dramatic. (imo..)

- James

I was a cranky curmudgeon myself (can we both be? I want to put it on my card) but it wasn’t directed at you or the collection of people holding a particular rank in university libraries. I thought a lot of the predictions were completely wrong (on two counts: won’t happen, and it’s a good thing, too) but without a better sense of audience/purpose I wasn’t sure how to approach them.

I wonder if Ranganathan got some guff of his own in the medium of the day. I would imagine he did – but I still find them incredibly useful. And they were written in 1931! Pretty cool. The interesting thing is that he wasn’t predicting the future, but they’re still relevant.

I will Save the Time of the Reader and stop here.

What got me thinking about this issue again are more recent reactions to the Taiga and Darien statements. Admittedly the worst of the remarks were anonymous. Now you might say that those should be discounted since some of them were not meant to be serious in the first place. I have to give credit to John Dupuis because he at least attached his name to his remarks about the Taiga statements – and he even mentions that they were written on April 1. So perhaps he not’s entirely serious either or he was going for parody. On the other hand, there was some thoughtful and serious criticism and discussion of both, and you’ll note that in my post I acknowledge that there are also positive signs that we have some active discourse in our profession. As I mention in the post, for me it becomes unfair or crosses over into ridicule when it becomes more about the person or people who wrote it than the content itself – and you may disagree and the sources may deny it but I detected that in the reactions to the Taiga statements – especially in comments and twitter remarks. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m being too sensitive or I’m reading too much into this – or I’m just being a cranky curmudgeon (yeah, I’ve been called that by another blogger), but I can’t help but think that it can have a chilling quality on the promotion or exchange of new ideas. I started off by observing that there is a dearth of new ideas coming out of this profession. Is it possible that a reason for this is the fear that one’s ideas will be ridiculed. Even if it comes from an anonymous blogger or commenter it still can be troublesome to an author. That’s why I chose to end that section of the post with a positive message to those who have ideas worth sharing – that they shouldn’t be intimidated to share them.