All the joking about socialism made me think about that concept, and I decided to make sure I had my terminology down correctly.  I quickly realized I am no socialist, but I am very strong follower of concept of the Welfare State Democracy.  Living within USA all these years has taught me the dark side of government which does not care about its people.  Not sure how much you have heard about welfare state democracy, but it is not government which taxes people to death, but a government whose mission is the welfare of its citizens.  Some of the more successful examples of democratic welfare states are the Nordic countries.

                Now you might wonder what all of this has to do with the libraries.   A lot of our talk lately revolved around ownership and building collections, as well as how librarians should be service to the communities.  The idea of making libraries future publishers was brought up, but that model just pulls us into the world of the commercial venue.  There is nothing wrong with that concept, but the concept I was struggling with is how to free libraries from above constrain and make them again true service to the community.  Being the person I am, I started to think how to break the system.  That does not mean on how to break the law, but how to break the current dependant state of the libraries. 

                In the past libraries in part have achieved at least some independence from the commercial venues by patrons and community’s donation to the collections of those libraries, but this day when digitization of the world is occurring at rapid rate this is not enough.  We do no deal just with physical artifacts anymore, but with the intangible data bits.  My idea for libraries to get free from publishers, distributers and all that commercial side of the world which is not in business of service to the communities (they are in business of making profit) is to bypass them.  Librarians need to start organizing and going directly to authors to get right of access to their works for the libraries.  Once the independent collections are secured it makes it easier to pursue our primary goal of knowledge generation.  Too much time these days librarians spend it on worrying about Amazon, Google, etc and how they should compete with them.  We are not here to compete, because we have a job which they cannot perform.  They sell stuff (or more often lease nowadays), we promote generation of the new knowledge.  They do not care if new stuff is created and if the communities are empowered, they only care about maximization of their profits.  So let’s stop trying playing in their world and create our own rules so we can achieve our own goals.