Summit Wrap Up - Emerging Themes - Open Floor

After her summary Lou opened the floor to questions/comments.

• how to prove our worth to decision makers, value-added
• we have the greatest prison population, greatest dropout rates of high school
• we have a solution to this - this is the group that can change the literacy rate
• show people who write checks that we have a mission, especially those that determine economics of this state we'll get funded
• less focus on bibliographic control - thinks that dangerous
• don't confuse complexity of bib control as a barrier to convenience and quality
• place not things - stress that collections that we have one of our very great strengths. need to figure out how to play to that strength
• as we share our resources the whole world becomes a library
• they come to us for our things
• describing them and making them available is still a big part of our job
• we love to create systems and we love to show users those systems
• they are the backbone of our system - but they don't belong to the users
• they need to be completely invisible
• need to have a business plan
• needs to be in laymans language
• what's the bang for the buck?
• highly refined well developed tool, but still a tool
• you don't want to be in the tool business
• people use tools, but don't need tools
• need to accomplish something, use tools
• classification is not just for location, that's a byproduct
• we make connection in the intellectual content of things
• catalogs haven't been made content rich
• if you don't put that in there they're not going to use
• yes it is a backbone
• outsourcing it undermines the whole system