The Customer is Always Right… Except When They’re Wrong

Jessamyn West was kind enough to link to me in relation to my rant post a few days ago. The question comes down to, what is our job as librarians? Are we simply purveyors of books? A video rental outlet? A storage facility for journals and books the faculty can’t fit in their office? Sometimes, as I study our “professional ethics”, it seems that we are a neutered profession. Don’t make judgments, don’t give advice and whatever you do, the customer is always right.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said “The right to swing my fist ends where the other mans nose begins,” referring to limitlessness of our rights, providing they do not infringe on other people’s rights. Should I have waived the fines for the woman who was in Florida and didn’t want to call? Well, there are two ways of looking at it. It would certainly make her satisfied (I hesitate to say happy because it was something she simply expected of us), but then that book is not circulating, the opportunity for that little piece of serendipity for another user is gone. Or what about the person who found it in the catalog, saw it wasn’t available, and went and found it somewhere else? Who’s got the “right” in this situation. It’s hard to say.

I am currently preparing an essay on the library as public space, the idea that a good that people can share non exclusive of the fact that other people are sharing it has a solid grounding in philosophy and is why I’m inclined to favor our nebulous “other patron” in this situation. 2.0 or not, our policies need to be designed in such a way that we maximize the publicness of our public libraries. That as a resource, it remains for as many people as possible to use. Our collections, our services and our missions ought to be developed and judged by their betterment of the public good and the public’s access to resources, rather than the tech savvy, the teens or the people who are standing in front of you at the time, and often that means stopping one person’s swing to keep the other’s nose.

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