I would propose a short test to see if you and your organization are ready to live in the world of disruptive technology.
- Can you consider buying half as many books as you now do and investing the money in other ways of providing information to library users?
- Can you act on what you learn from freshman when what they teach you runs counter to what the faculty say they want?
- Can you trust small groups in your library to develop products and services, or does everyone on the staff have to buy in to everything?
- Are you prepared to spend money to develop exploratory projects knowing that one in three will fail?
If you can answer yes to all of these questions your library may be ready. If you cannot, you need to get ready. As a first step, read The Innovator's Dilemma.
As librarians look at library culture, it is important to understand how different the culture that they need to create is from the culture of the recent past Less than thirty years ago, the most important thing that libraries did was to keep millions and millions of pieces of paper in the correct order. Libraries did other things, of course, but if the pieces of paper were not in the correct order nothing else mattered. Libraries' processes and values made it possible for successful libraries to create and manage very large and complex paper files. The processes have changed as libraries were automated, but the values are in many ways still the same.
ReplyDeleteTwo things are essential to change the culture. First, change what individuals need to do to be successful in the organization and in their careers. Second, create structures that encourage and reinforce the cultural change. These would include the following:
1. porous organizational boundaries that allow ideas and knowledge to flow in and out of the organization;
2. collaboration among all staff that creates the ability and willingness to share knowledge and expertise freely. This means, at least in part, addressing the longstanding class distinctions between librarians and other library staff;
3. impatience, which leads to a desire to explore, innovate, and change;
4. accountability and the ability and willingness to measure results and make consequences visible. If libraries can not do this, they will not be able to convince
campus administrators that new approaches are really serving students; and
5. trust that colleagues will exercise competence and good professional judgment even, or especially, when they are doing things differently than you would.
Regular organizational realignments are useful. Like periodically moving the furniture, changing roles and relationships keeps people fresh and, over time, builds flexibility in the organization.