Listening to Cliff Stoll was quite entertaining and enjoyable. What he has to say is what many librarians already eschew: understanding is more important than the right answer. Once of his statements that stuck with me was, “Answers have something to do with, but is not the same as understanding.”
Stoll spoke of the value of doing it yourself, learning from that process too. He even gave Marlene Porter and Bette Sydelko a jar of his own homemade plum jam. Of course, doing it yourself takes time, something that our current society doesn’t seem to highly value. There are good, fast and cheap for nearly all aspects of life. We can usually have two of these, but we cannot usually have all three at once, and yet, that’s what everyone wants each and every day.
As one attendee asked about, our users don’t think our services are expensive. They think they are cheap because they don’t see the costs associated with it. Stoll stated that we need to explicitly state to folks that these resources are expensive and we are lucky that our institution provides them.