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11 Trends L. Libr. Mgmt. & Tech. 1 (2000)

handle is hein.journals/ttllmt11 and id is 1 raw text is: March 2000 Vol. 11 No. 1 IN LAW LIBRARY MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY Edited by Mark E. Estes . For academic, firm, corporate, and government law librarians The Architecture of Fire: Librarianship Transformed By GRACEANNE A. DECANDIDO, Blue Roses Editorial and Web Consulting Speech given to the Westchester Library Association, Tarrytown, New York, May 14, 1999 t has come to pass in my family that I am the person who builds fires. Every Saturday night from Halloween to Easter, I kneel in front of our fireplace with dry leaves, kindling, twigs, and small logs and build a little edifice. It's a bit tricky, you know. There has to be enough space around the wood for air to circulate, but not too much, because then the larger pieces won't catch. Because the smaller things are on the bottom, balance is cru- cial. Once the fire is burning, it creates another kind of architecture of light and heat, an architecture of exploding sparks and sweet scents. To keep all of that going requires knowledge of when to poke and prod, and when to let it be. I can't do anything else when I am tending the fire. It is completely seduc- tive, claiming my whole attention. I do my best thinking there, in front of our fireplace. The sweet small clumsy feet of April, baseball and roses, the carousel in Central Park, don't quite make it up to me for the months without fire. It was during one of those fire-building sessions that the title, and the fundamental image, for this talk came to me. I knew that transformation was the key to what seems to be happening in our profes- sional lives, and I loved the transformation of scrap © 1999, 2000 GraceAnne A. DeCandido I wood and branches into warmth, solace, illumina- tion, and comfort. At the end of the fire, of course, the transformation is ashes. But the key to the trans- formation of librarianship is that we end up like the phoenix, the bird of ancient myth that arises reborn from its own conflagration. Pretty heavy stuff, don't you think? Already we have images of burning and consummation, death and resurrection, fire and ashes. I submit to you that these are telling images for the way many of us feel at work these days. In the April 1996 issue of the Association of Research Libraries Newsletter, there is an intriguing analysis of the age demographics of academic librarians. More than 75% of ARL academic librari- ans are over forty-five; more intriguing, at least to me, was the curve indicating that in 1994 not even one-quarter of academic librarians in ARL libraries were aged forty-five to forty-nine. I am precisely in that range. You may come from many types of libraries, but I suspect many of you fall in that range, too. We greying boomers have been the ele- phant in the demographic python our whole lives, and here we are again. Or still. There may be disadvantages to being part of such a huge and over-analyzed population group, but there are advantages, too. One of them is that continued on page 2 March 2000 1

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