This We Believe - from George and Joan

Some well-articulated statements from George and Joan about the professional responsiblities of librarians in a wrold of change:
http://georgeandjoan.com/about/believe.html

J: I believe that librarians
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Do well to cultivate our innate curiosity. We benefit when we listen to and learn from other people, especially people who aren’t just like us.
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Are responsible for the consequences of our professional choices – including when the choice is to take no action, and even when the consequences are unintended.
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Need to be steadfast in support of our principles, and flexible in pursuit of new techniques for implementing those principles.
G: I believe that to thrive in the future, libraries and librarians must
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Understand our value proposition. What do we bring to our communities that no one else does? Is this valuable to our communities?
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Understand how the roles have changed (reference service, AV).
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Understand how the rules have changed (privacy, open source).
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Embrace the stereotype. Books are our brand. Reading, and by extension learning, is our most important product. Secular transformation is the outcome. But entertainment is OK, too.
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Avoid confusing the community with extraneous details or symbols.
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Avoid antagonizing the community with rules that are a holdover from the age of scarcity.
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Talk to non‐librarians in words that are meaningful to them, not us.
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Develop meaningful ways to measure and describe the work we do.
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Build teams that look like our communities.
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Continue to provide the respite from commercialism, while understanding that adopting a sanctimonious avoidance of the commercial world is not in the best long term interest of the institution, either.

George and Joan

George Needham and Joan Frye-Williams have formed a new consultancy to help libraries in future planning and strategy development.
They have a website:
http://georgeandjoan.com/about/who.html

and a blog:
http://www.georgeandjoan.com/blog/

Their what we believe statement sums it up:
http://georgeandjoan.com/about/believe.html