SLA’s Future Ready 365 team invited me to add an honorary “special” to my librarian credentials and write a post for them, so I wrote Alice in Libraryland. The first paragraph isn’t very rabbit-hole-ish:
Imagine walking through the stacks in your favorite library. The slightly worn spines creating that familiar regular irregularity on each side, that distinctive smell of books and dust and filtered air, everything promising far more to explore than you could ever chart out in one lifetime, everything beckoning you toward its own particular rabbit hole of interconnected facts and ideas. Imagine pulling several books off the shelves to take with you, either to check out or to spread in front of you in the reading room.
After that? Well, I’ve already written with Steve Lawson about some ideas for staving off the insanity and steer us towards one model that might allow us to capitalize on the benefits of new formats without such potential for seeing white rabbits.