I believe I have solved the bibliographic koans with which you have presented us and provide the following tongue-in-cheek answers below:

“All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.”

…as will we all, but rock and roll is here to stay!

*****
“You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.”

Insert “Hawaii-Five-O” music here and try to giggle like the goofball at the beginning of the song, “Wipeout”.

*****
“You are not a format. You are a service.”

Your are not a format but you are expected to be a doormat.

*****
“The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.”

That’s just great…hardware maintenance will take forever now!

*****
“The user is the sun.”

The user is the sun…but “We are the world”.

*****
“The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.”

Curse my LIS advisor for telling me it was pixie dust and unicorns!!

*****
“The user is not broken.”

…but soon will be if you tell them that your OPAC is really a distant planet and they’re the magic element that can transform you.

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“Your system is broken until proven otherwise.”

First, prove it’s broken; otherwise it works just fine.

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“That vendor who just sold you the million-dollar system because “librarians need to help people” doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, and his system is broken, too.”

If his system was broken to begin with, why purchase it in the first place?…..because libraries are always trying to “ride the wave”. Maybe one day, they’ll realize that a popsicle stick is not a surfboard!

*****
“Most of your most passionate users will never meet you face to face.”

…that’s because they’re out trying to satiate their passions.

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“Most of your most alienated users will never meet you face to face.”

…that’s because we scared them off when we said they were a magical transforming element.

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“The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way.”

…or simply write their term papers for them…that’s what they really want!

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“Your website is your ambassador to tomorrow’s taxpayers. They will meet the website long before they see your building, your physical resources, or your people.”

Your website is kind of like an online dating service…make sure you include pictures.

*****
“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to find a library website that is usable and friendly and provides services rather than talking about them in weird library jargon.”

Once the camel realizes that the needle is an illusion his cosmic awareness will expand until camel, needle and universe become merely fading reflections on a falling raindrop.

*****
“Information flows down the path of least resistance. If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it.”

Once, I tried to mail my letters and buy groceries at the bank but they didn’t offer that service so I went to the post office and supermarket instead.

*****
“You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user.”

I thought the user was supposed to be the magical element that would transform librarianship.

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“Meet people where they are–not where you want them to be.”

Meet me halfway and we’ll go from there.

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“The user is not “remote.” You, the librarian, are remote, and it is your job to close that gap.”

If librarians are remote then we are subsequently controlled remotely and yet; loss of control has already happened, so Dear User, Miss Manners says to “Ride the wave!”

*****
“The average library decision about implementing new technologies takes longer than the average life cycle for new technologies.”

That’s OK because “all technologies eventually evolve and die” and the system is already broken. The next technobauble whirlygig is just around the corner. A good surfer knows how to wait for the killer wave.

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“If you are reading about it in Time and Newsweek and your library isn’t adapted for it or offering it, you’re behind.”

So the question must be posed, do back issues of “Time” make a librarian’s “behind” look too big?

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“Stop moaning about the good old days. The card catalog sucked, and you thought so at the time, too.”

But they were made of burnished oak for crying out loud…..who wouldn’t want that compared to injection molded plastic computer casing!!

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“If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow’s cobblers.”

Can I be peach cobbler?

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“We have wonderful third spaces that offer our users a place where they can think and dream and experience information. Is your library a place where people can dream?”

It will be as soon as we install the sensory deprivation chambers.

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“Your ignorance will not protect you.”

That’s what rabid attack poodles with laser cannons mounted on their foreheads are for.

How about the first one? “All technologies and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.” No, in fact most technologies evolve but very few of them die. The telephone, a comparatively unevolved technology of recent time, is still better for some kinds of communication than e-mail or IM/chat. It is falteringly evolving via VOIP; it certainly is not dead since I was in library school. Nor are such technologies as radio, the book, the bicycle that I often ride to work, a typing keyboard, indexing systems, and on and on.

And in fact it is that “on and on” part that is the point here. Short, sharp statements don’t tell much of the story, but Schneider is more interested in complaining than in explaining.

One of the respondents to Schneider, another blogger with the handle of “panlibus” said, “The post takes the form of a list of statements, the vast majority of which it must surely be almost impossible to disagree with.
So what do we do about it?”

Well, in fact I can both agree and disagree with nearly every one of the statements, and I believe that critical thinkers should be able to find the important disagreements there too. “The system is broken.” Well yes, in some ways it is; but no, it (the library, the OPAC, the librarian) definitely is not broken with the implication being that we should just walk away from it and quit using it all right now. We, thousands of people collaborating in the profession, have been aware of, for example, the varied inadequacies of the OPAC and the Integrated Library System for some years and are trying to find ways of fixing it.

The user? There is no one lump that can be called the user. Involved librarians, who did in fact learn about the complexity of users in library school, really do find ways of responding to “the user”. The user can be a sophisticated faculty person or seasoned public library patron both of whom still learn new approaches from us; the user may be coming to advanced academic work for the first time, or may be advancing from step to step in the ways of academic work and information use; the user may be an inveterate reader or a reluctant reader; the user can be generalized sometimes as a whole community; the user knows what he or she wants and does not know what he or she wants, knows what he or she needs and very often does not. To say otherwise is to be dismissive of the rich history of reference work, of cataloging, and of community dialog.

To chide us, the profession, with little scraps of rhetoric is, as I said, mostly a rant that is self-congratulatory and asks others to join in being self-congratulatory. There is nothing new in these remarks. Other critics have already presented these challenges and done it better. There are some pseudo poeticisms here (the OPAC as “distant planet”; “the user is the magic element”; the tired biblical tag: “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”…) But then, oh, get this: “The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way.”

What is the message here? How do you add value and meaning to the information experience (which in fact so many of us do when we teach students and public patrons, when we do reference work, when we think through the selection decisions, when we come up with some subject headings for a complex book, when we do try to see what Google and Amazon and Starbucks are up to) and at the same time “get out of the way”? What a silly piece of rhetoric.

Do we need some self-satisfied oracle giving out a list of retreads of other people’s thinking and then telling us: “Your ignorance will not protect you.”? Do the responders to this list think that our profession is peopled by a bunch of frauds, prigs, and idiots? Does it take a simple-minded list of contradictions to make people want to think and speak up?

I hope you decide not to change from 2nd person. I think “you” makes the manifesto more challenging/in-your-face, which is how manifestoes (manifestae?) should be. “We” would make it more comfortable… And manifestoes should not make us feel comfortable.

I’d love it if you could find a way to add the fact that today’s young people are tomorrow’s taxpayers (and voters), and should therefore be cherished, listened to, and never made to feel unwelcome.

Thanks for the call to arms!