Changes in the Zeitgeist?

Yesterday, I did a 45-minute version of the Perceptions Report presentation titled "The User Driven Library" at the SOLINET Annual Members Meeting in Atlanta. The second last slide in the presentation made some suggestions of what a "user driven library" might look like:

• Clean, uncluttered, well-lit facilities
• Self-directed service
• "Free range" learning
• Education, not just information
• Listening, not just hearing
• Acting, not just planning

In the Q and A session at the end, someone suggested that many librarians are already doing a lot of these things, and so I asked for a show of hands on whether people were, say, conscientiously weeding appropriate collections to make them more attractive and accessible, or recreating reference services to get away from place-bound or desk-bound service. About two-thirds of the audience said yes to the first question, and about half said yes to the second. There was somewhat less agreement when I asked if people were reformulating their budgets and facilities to support independent learning with more public programming or group study space.

When we first started talking about the environmental scan and then the Perceptions report, there was a lot of pushback about some of the ideas, especially the ones around self-service and rethinking user expectations. Have we started to reach a tipping point? Have enough libraries started to go down this path that we can start to see some real progress? What's your experience in this?