Why Catastrophism Fails Libraries

摘要

We just celebrated an important holiday-towel day. Sadly, I only just found out about it as I browsed the Internet when I should have been working. But I will henceforth do what I can to "really know where my towel is," to quote the late great Douglas Adams. This may come in handy, because I've been thinking a lot about "disruptive innovation" and what that really means, about massive open online courses (MOOCs) and what the rhetoric around them tells us about the present state of higher education, and about the millennial talk about the future of libraries. What I keep coming back to when I unravel all the complex and scary ideas are some fairly simple concepts that actually haven't changed much in a long time. Library values are, for me, like the towel that Ford Prefect carried.