Lessons Learned from _The Nightmare Before Christmas_

My husband and I love the movie The Nightmare before Christmas, and we watch it every year around this time. The plot is a little thin, but the details in the film are just fantastic. There are gags nesting within other gags, like Russian dolls, and they are smart, funny little jokes, too. Overall, it's just a jewel of a film.

Usually I like the movie because Jack (The Pumpkin King) realizes that happiness can't be found in work, and instead is available in the arms of a good woman. A fine message about priorities, in my opinion.

However, this year I took away something else: stray from your core service, or your core message, at your own peril.

You see, Jack and the denizens of Halloween Town decide to take over Christmas, with monstrous results (kids get severed heads instead of presents, the toys attack the recipients, etc.). Jack nearly dies and realizes that he should stick with what he and his fellow flok in Halloween Town are best at: scaring the daylights out of people.

I think the message is important for libraries: there's a lot we can be doing in this day and age, and there's a very real push away from core library services as we struggle to "redefine" ourselves. I'm as pro-progess as the next person (maybe too much so for some), but I think Jack teaches a valuable lesson. A Pumpkin King is a Pumpkin King, not Santa Claus. A library is a library, with exceptional skills in acquiring, organizing, and disseminating information. We're not (usually) instructional design experts or (again, usually) hard-core IT people, or a million other things.

This isn't coming out the way I wanted it to; I guess I need to think on it some more. If libraries are equivilent to the Pumpkin King, then what is the Santa Claus we're trying to become? I can't quite put my finger on that part of the analogy. Still, doing what you are good at and building a team of experts to cover the areas where you're not so hot is always a good idea.