MANAGING THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION - REMEMBERING OLD LESSONS

These days it is becoming an axiom to consult ''customers'' (faculty and students) about how well we are meeting their information needs. Moreover we spend time testing peer institutions through formal and informal means-benchmarking has become the rage; so too has the effort to apply new technologies to the information retrieval role of libraries and deal with the crises of the ''price revolution'' in published materials. Our thinking is too often influenced by the ever present here and now-the latest hot new organizational trend, information technology (IT) product or system. Reasonable people might argue that we should look deeper when we ask questions of our users or benchmark the market. What we may be missing in our efforts is a clear picture of what we are really about, that is our true mission. It is not to preserve libraries and librarianship as we have known them, but to preserve the ends to which they were built. This distinction between means and ends is forcefully brought home by Edward Stricker-CBL, Carnegie Mellon University.