Painting a moving train

Blogged conference reports can be somewhat telegraphese – but are often interesting to scan.
Here are a couple – followed by an observation.
Richard Akerman blogs the Info-grid conference over several entries beginning here. A while ago, Overdue Ideas reported on Ex-Libris user meetings extensively. See the message here and following (without a visible archive I cannot get back to earlier messages than this one).
The Ex-Libris report notes Mark Ellingsen’s (University of Bristol) remarks on web services, and his conclusion that we need to better understand library processes and how they relate to other institutional processes. Presentations at the Info-grid conference emphasise emerging repository architectures, support for e-research, new user participation services around repositories.
This conjunction shows one of the tensions we are experiencing as things change. We need to better understand processes so that we can successfully tackle them in economical ways. However, there is no still vantage point from which to do this, as we also need to renovate and develop new processes appropriate to changing user environments. It is like, as one of my colleagues said recently, painting a moving train.