"On customer driven librarianship" Buschman

We have talked and read a bit before this article about differing theories of what libraries should be and how they should serve patrons. One the one hand, I agree with the author that the kind of vision that goes along with vocabulary like accountability and quality are suspect because of their underlying business model, I wonder what other kind of theory is acceptable in this day and age. I don’t think that it would be feasible in any way to go back to the staunchly authoritarian and protective stance that many of the founding librarians in American ascribed to. The age when people were willing to be lectured and lead into reading information that someone else picked for them is over. I think that although the customer-based attitude can often drown out the other objectives that a library has as a community center and a place to introduce people to new kinds of knowledge, the base fact remains that people will only go into libraries to find what they are looking for, not what the librarian happens to be offering. Since a library is voluntary, there are some elements of the business model that just cannot be excluded from discussions about how to run a library. I am not really sure what the author means when they state at the end that customer driven librarianship is leaking away democracy. In my mind, they can go together very well. What do democracies do better than authorities but listen and react to the people, those who hold the power? I would think that customer-driven practices would bolster, not diminish democracy, if democracy is driven by the wants and needs of the public and the public is the customer. At the base, I suspect a defensive tone is taking over the reasoning of the author, a certain kind of fear about what will happen to libraries when the people who pay for it are allowed to direct it. Can’t libraries both serve the public and be a beacon of direct democracy, simply by doing the former? I don’t buy this author’s argument in the least that those two don’t go together or cannot do so in America.