Tell me which of the following sounds familiar to you:

• “We wanted to do it, but our administration didn’t see the value in the technology and didn’t want to devote staff time or funds to it.” -OR-
  
  
• “We had to go through 6 committees and rewrite 4 library policies to get approval to start a blog, so it took a year to get it going.” -OR-
  
  
• “Our web and IT staff have a project back-log of more than a year so any new ideas have to wait.”

Libraries, as organizations, are not nimble. We desperately need to look at how we make decision and how we encourage innovation in our libraries. Nearly all of the libraries I have visited or worked in do not encourage innovation.

In fact, innovation is discouraged through the structure and practices of our organizations. A huge barrier is the generations-old librarian “fear of failure” that is so great that no one is allowed to try anything unless is has been planned to death and has already been implemented in 80% or more of other libraries. Staff are also hesitant to innovate because of the multi-level bureaucracy that libraries seem to love. These bureaucracies are seemingly insurmountable to us regular ol’ staff because of three things:

• the natural frustration we all have with complex bureaucracies that make us want to cry
  
  
• the reality that “the little guy,” which many of our new librarian staff are, probably isn’t on the committee that makes the big decisions
  
  
• and third, people don’t have the extra time in their workdays for the hours required to organize a project to make its way through the bureaucracy. The staff are already over-burdened by their other duties and few people want to work an extra 5 hours every week just so they can be the ones trying new things in their workplaces.

We create walls between us and innovation and then put down on paper that we want to innovate, that we have a strategic plan to move us forward. “Huzzah!” we say to ourselves. And yet, our plan falls woefully short of what we really need to get us to where our customers expect us to be.

...Until we break down the walls that stand between libraries and innovation, all this talk of shiny new things doesn’t mean a thing. The libraries that have broken down those walls, or at least found secret passageways through them here and there, are the ones who we see innovating, the ones we see featured in Library Journal or Computers in Libraries. It ain’t the ones with a committee structure that looks more complicated than my family tree.

Writers might be word magicians but we readers are the new alchemists. Without a reader a book is simply a stack of papers dense with type and edged in glue. But when a reader grabs hold of a book, when a reader introduces her mind and heart and body to a book, that book is transformed, becomes something extraordinary.

Readers supply the galvanic human spark that bring these Frankenstein creations we call books to life. Readers transmute cold paper and stale ink into vibrant human gold. Readers are the nervous system of literature and readers alone can reach through time and space and connect one imperfect human soul with another they have never met. They can bridge the spaces between us, all through the simple act of reading.

We readers, I suspect, will be remembered more than any individual writer for safeguarding that delicate web of human interconnectivity that so many forces wish to buy, capture, enslave and mine.

Readers will be remembered long after we are all gone for holding the line against the dehumanising forces of our civilisation. Even if tomorrow all the books of the world disappeared in a flash of woodpulp and binding it would be you, you readers, who would keep the dream of that human alchemy alive.

For it is in the simple act of reading where the living and the dead, the real and the imagined, meet. It is in the simple act of reading where we exercise those two most sacred of human vocations: compassion and creativity. For as we know, without either of these primes there is no possibility for a humanity present or past worth talking about.

Read [Diaz's speech] when you have helped the 100th person log onto Yahoo! Mail, when you have separated your tenth set of teens locked in either battle or lust, when you have reached your breaking point, read this. And remember what we do as librarians and why.