Love...order...progress

Love our principle,
Order our foundation,
Progress our goal.
--Auguste Comte

The switch back to the Franklin Planner is already paying off--this is today's "inspirational" quote at the top of the notes page.

I initially glanced at it and moved on, but then I was arrested by its resonance and decided to both post it in my office and write about it.

I don't think Monsieur Comte was thinking about libraries, but he was thinking about "alturism" or "the moral obligations of individuals to serve others and place their interests above one's own" (quoted from the Wikipedia article linked above). What are (most) libraries if not an embodiment of alturistic feeling?

Love our principle
"Hey, instead of buying all these books and locking them up in rich people's houses or rich institutions, let's put 'em out on shelves where anyone can walk in and look at them! And then, let's form giant sharing arrangements where almost anything can be gotten by almost anyone for almost no charge!"

Order our foundation
Oh, and let's get 'em all organized so you can find them, too. AND, let's all use the same or very similar systems so users can wander into any library anywhere and get the gist of how things are put together.

Can you argue that order is NOT our foundation? We collect, we organize, and we disseminate. If you don't catalog it, or index it, or tag it, or whatever you wanna call it, you can't find it, making collecting moot and disseminating impossible.

Progress our goal
Why do we do what we do? Certainly not for the huge personal financial gains. I actually just had a very interesting conversation with my boss about measuring the actual impact of library services (or in our case, library improvements). If progress is the goal, how do you measure that? It's a sticky question that I'm willing to put aside for the moment, just to feel good about the possibility of progress. I'll take it on faith that the world is a better place because we all troop in each day and do the best we can at what we do.

WDT