Last week I was asked to submit a written draft of our library’s Vision, like, pronto. This scared me to death, because I’ve done a lot of presenting and talking and so on, but I don’t have a Vision. (I have progressive lenses–quite reasonable at CostCo–but that’s not quite the same thing.)
But my boss said otherwise. She said she’d heard me talk about the vision and all I needed to do was write it down. And 18 hours later (two drives, a short sleep and shower, and two meetings in between), I had. It felt a little bit like those MFA assignments where after piffling for weeks if not months I put the pedal to the metal and got ‘er done–because the synthesis had happened elsewhere, slowly, over time.
The Vision is no big surprise. It is all very learning commons, flexible furniture, zoning for group study and quiet study, research lab rooms, study rooms, etc. If you follow me on Flickr, you can fill in the blanks.
Where I did go out on a limb was also no real biggy if you’ve been following trends. I wrote that by 2015 95% of our monographs (aka “books”) would be off-site in centralized mass storage. (This is another reason I’m so keen on Navigator. I get it: centralize the books, mass our potential, and deliver scholarly monographs on demand. Smart!)
I thought this forecast was terribly daring because when I first began saying the paper-based book would be an anachronism in my lifetime (my *very long* lifetime… I hope, anyway) — circa 1998 — there were some who held my opinions askance. But when I brought up the whole centralized-mass-storage thing with a handful of peers (terribly unscientific, like I care), they didn’t bat an eye, and I don’t think they were pretending to be too cool for school.
(Which is interesting, because it’s not as if, sitting here right now, we have a place and a method to relocate this material, let alone retrieve it for use…)
For legacy print materials–the stuff clogging entire floors of library buildings– economics are with access, not ownership. The mechanisms will soon follow. These mechanisms won’t be free; dollar per dollar, access might not be cheaper, fully-managed, than ownership. But it will be better access, and better service.
At any rate, so my Vision is terribly mainstream, at least by my standards.Well, ok!
This put me in a reflective mood. One advantage of managing a library in a small, tuition-dependent university is that we don’t have time for the cruft. We cannot afford to be anything other than terribly efficient. So we need to constantly ask the questions: What services will we deemphasize? What will we emphasize? What do our users need? How do we know? What are the current best practices? What is the most important thing we need to be doing right now? How do we know?
We live in exciting times. I wish I always knew the answers to these questions. But I admit some joy in the quest.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Snowglobes and my research quest - 2015
- Big Bend Library Camp? - 2008
- Read-in for Salinas, April 2-5 - 2005
- Webcred article in The Nation, Garage Bands, and The World - 2005
- ALA Election Turnout Update - 2004
I would add a question to the list in the reflective paragraph. When will we know that a risk is worth taking?
Most of what librarians call risk is not risky at all (to begin with), just as what librarians call “failure” is not really failure. It’s just change that needs iterative tinkering to be successful. One syndrome I used to see a lot, and thankfully see a lot less of, is the tendency to immediately hone in on the worst possible scenario or outcome and dwell there indefinitely. (What I call Fear Factor Librarianship.) Another is to try something and then give up when it doesn’t work the first time.
Risk isn’t about when; it’s about how. Does the risk fit the strategic vision? Do you need a contingency plan? (Again, if you don’t–if failure is harmless–then it’s really not a risk; if you do need a plan, is it a viable contingency?) Does the risk motivate you (plural) to make necessary change? Does it inspire others to help you succeed? Are there alternatives, and are they better? What are the outcomes if you do not take the risk?
To my way of thinking, if you desire to be a library director you should have a vision for what you believe a library should do for its community and what role the librarians should play in achiving that position. Taking on the responsibilities of library director is your opportunity to fulfill the vision – which may be something that you’ve been building up during the course of your career. When I was serving as a director at a small tuition driven instituiton the vision was very much about integrating the library into the teaching and learning process and establishing the librarians as partners with faculty in educating students. The building was not a part of the vision, although we developed shorter range plans for improving the building (e.g., removing a little used double-decker carrel thing and replacing it with collaborative computing furniture). I’m sure you do have a non-facility vision and perhaps in this situation you just didn’t have sufficent time for it to evolve. In my new position I’ve been seeing things in a different way and that is contributing to the development of a new vision.
I should clarify that the building is in no way the totality of the vision. I say that in a friendly way, biting back the first response I was going to write. That vision I was asked for was indeed facility-focused. If it had been focused on other resources, you would have read a different blog post, because we are indeed working on partnering with faculty, etc. It’s not that I don’t have time for my vision to “evolve” (I once again take a deep breath and push my “edit button”), but frankly, because we’re doing so much, and taking so many strides, that I don’t have time to write about it.
We have been doing remarkable things with services and will continue to do so in even more creative ways. Right now we have a facility that makes it hard to deliver the vision. I plan to change that.
Oh, and one more thing. I do indeed “want to be a library director” (or more to the point, keep finding myself in executive roles) and this is my third stint managing a small library, with also five years managing a statewide project, six years management experience in the military, and several years self-employed.
If I only conveyed part of what is going on, well, that was misleading. But with nearly two decades’ worth of executive experience, I know better than to say the building is NOT part of the vision. We had a great saying in the Air Force: “parts is parts.” That expression means many things but it points to the very basic requirements of any physical organization. The mission may be “to fly and fight and win,” but you still gotta have parts. (I was reminded of that watching “Into the Wild” the other night. Great vision, pernicious execution.) I, for one, believe our community will be much better-served when our restrooms have exhaust fans and you don’t need to be a discus thrower to open our library doors. Small things, perhaps, but you don’t sit near those bathrooms or wrestle those doors open every day.
Also, to quibble a bit, what you call your vision at your previous library was a goal, not the vision itself. That’s a picky distinction to some, but though we are indeed working on integrating info lit into curriculum–I’ve spent a good five hours on that task this week alone–it’s part of a much larger vision.
What is “Navigator”? Sounds like something I would want to learn more about.
It’s interesting to me that most of the trendy library vision ideas these days are about _facilities_ and not _services_. I hope we still have a role in providing services to our users, both on- and (increasingly mostly) off-site.
Well, I see from this post that because I haven’t been blogging exhaustively about the service-based changes we’ve been implementing (mostly because I am too frickin’ busy to do so), my post came off skewed. We are doing a lot with services, and we are focusing on better services to low- and no-residence populations, as part of our strategy for recruitment and retention. But the facility is an obstacle, and part of that obstacle is the overhead and space constraints of dealing with legacy content.
First, a lot of the facility planning I’m doing is based on the needs of all types of students: low-residence, no-residence, and residential. We have a lot of in-person classes and those students need places to read, group-study, dream, nap, snack, conduct experiments, meet up with friends, and even sit and stare in space. Not only is this not the University of Phoenix, but when our low-residence students arrive on campus, they really, really need this place, and we really, really want them here. Our distance students need better services, and so we need to upgrade our aged training room, with its dim old projectors and its 8-year-old computers and its lack of video or smartboard or anything like that. I teach information literacy myself and I can tell you that after five classes in a row I was ready to renovate that room RIGHT THEN AND THERE.
As for being facility-based, well, ok, Jonathan, call me an old fuddy-duddy librarian with no service vision, but this community has responded warmly and positively to our many service changes in the past several months, including events we have held and are planning to hold. In this day and age, to bring people together to share literature, art, and nice nibblies is a good thing. It makes us better people and honors our creations. But I can only hold so many events here without disrupting the commuter students here to study, the residential students looking for a change of venue for their study habits, the Nursing Weekend contingents, etc.
And given our population, we still have a need for providing computers to students. They don’t all have laptops and many of them are coming from jobs and so forth that make it difficult to bring a laptop. This is anecdotal, but I plan to measure this, and will report back. Those that do, appreciate cushy chairs, cafes, and wifi.
A faculty member even said “Ooh” (literally, said “Ooh”) when I talked about converting some scary little rooms downstairs into Honors Rooms: merit-based study rooms assigned to faculty, students, and visiting faculty. Dang, sign ME up for one of those.
Navigator is OCLC’s resource-sharing product. I’m part of the first wave of small private libraries that will be resource-sharing via Navigator (think Innreach but based on WorldCat).
And one more thing: the same time I was asked for the “vision thing” I was asked to submit a description of another position. I conveniently had already drafted this out several weeks earlier 😉 so formatting it and sending it along took much less of my brainspace than the “vision thing” (which had largely been, up to that point, visual!).
But… and I say this carefully… a lot of our service delivery is limited by workforce realities. 2 student hours equals one more library service hour; a half-time adjunct librarian represents nearly 20 hours of desk service and other services, such as instruction and pathfinder development; a full-time librarian represents a quantum leap in service capabilities. That’s the reality of being staffed at this level.
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I may be about to engage in “zeroing in on the worst-case scenario,” but the ephemeral nature of electronic access continues to concern me: The content I have relied on suddenly disappears due to a change in pricing, contract terms, or (cf. the Tasini case of some years back) a court decision. The print a library owns does not suddenly vanish into thin air, except in the rare instances when it disappears into flood or fire, or into the dumpster due to weeding run amok. I get all the advantages of electronic, but a piece is missing, and that piece is reliability. If I’m a scholar, I want to be assured that the access I have today is also the access I will have tomorrow.
No, you are right to be concerned, but that’s where centralized mass storage comes into play! Read the next post…
centralized mass storage WITH a counting mechanism so that we aren’t ever down to one copy in one place. Six physical copies? Ten? Lots of copies keeps stuff safe. (Thank you, LOCKSS.)