challenging question

Kelly asks: “What are the three biggest challenges facing college libraries today?”

The first biggest challenge that I see is finding the ability to deliver resources and services to our users in the manner in which they expect (and quite frankly, in our current consumer educational climate, demand). To do this, libraries need to break down the barriers that they have upheld for many years regarding information type and format in order to deliver materials via a unified interface (and yes, i’m talking about the web interface as always). This will demand a great amount of reconciliation and work between the manner in which our vendors provide resources and the way in which our individual libraries present that information.

The second biggest challenge i think comes with increasing our commitment to information literacy. These two points should go hand in hand, i believe. While I do not believe that our interfaces should reflect the difficult information environment, i do think that our classrooms should address it and that libraries and librarians will bear the challenge of this.

Third biggest challenge is staffing (and training for that staff)– as our jobs become more complicated and busy (doesn’t it seem that the more technology allows to be more productive, the more time is disappearing? how is this possible – i’m getting more done, but i still feel as though i don’t have enough time to get everything i need to do  done). Ultimately, while my focus is on electronic resources and environments, libraries and librarianship are a people business. This means that it is important to retain our face and our personal relationships with our users and the institutions that we support. In an era of job consolidation and an common misconception that believes that technology resources can replace human ones, we must make sure that our institutions and administrations value our human element more than ever.

By the way, as always, my answers apply to all types of libraries – college, public, special, you name it.

What are your answers?

Taking Conference Knowledge One Step Further: Implementing Change

I would like to direct everyone who hasn’t seen it already to David’s blog post about Change in Libraries.

As the intern for the MARS Preconference Planning Committee for this June’s Reinvented Reference III at ALA in D.C., this is exactly the sort of problem that I’m hoping that I can help address. During my conference attendance over the last 12 months (ALA in New Orleans and CLA in Sacramento), it seemed to me that all of the speakers and panel participants that I saw pointed out why we should be using [x] technology and even gave great examples of how the technology (once implemented) could be used (e.g. director’s blogs, blogs for book discussion, podcasting for storytimes, videocasts for tutorials & marketing, etc.) but included no real mention of how to get from the first point to the second. Namely – how to deal with concerns such as how to get your staff and/or administration on board and how to pay mind to concerns of actual implementation – everything from network security, to suggestions for policy or guidelines for use, to threats of taking up valuable staff time or concerns of who will maintain the sites. As a new grad in my first professional position, I am facing multiple road blocks in exactly these areas and while of course I understand the value of providing services with social software and mixed media and I have great ideas as to how they would work for my library, these logistical concerns are foiling me.

Just as David has pointed out, most of the folks in conference audiences want to implement these things – we know about them and we think they are wonderful, this is not new stuff – but we are running into roadblocks that these presentations (at least the ones that I attended) largely ignore. I’m not suggesting that speakers intend to ignore these elements, however I do know that given the limited time period of conference programs and presentations, it would be impossible to address these concerns in any meaningful way. That is why another member of the preconference committee and I have proposed to make these sorts of resources available to folks after the conference with our Takeaway Materials – materials which will hopefully be blog or wiki based so that they may be continually added to or updated by folks in our library community.

I’m hoping that these materials will help library folks implement the changes that they have already invested so much time and energy in learning about.

diversity dog

April is Diversity Month. While walking my dog this afternoon I was approached by a young african-american boy on a bicycle who asked me whether my dog was black or white. I responded that he was tri-color to which the boy declared, to Charles, “You are white, black and brown. You represent all people. I’m down with that,” and he pedaled away.

Monday, Monday

Last week was a beast, today feels better already. The progress toward getting the folks on top to understand the importance of social software in libraries is slow – in fact I almost believed stopped last week – but appears to have gained some first nervous allies (or at least one first nervous ally) I am thankful for them.

Of course, there are still some problems facing implementation: first, the tendency of some of my colleagues to reduce social software to MySpace and then stonewall based on their incorrect perceptions regarding its safety; second, because I currently have no staff, there is concern over who will create/moderate content. I see this latter point as the real challenge. Unfortunately, even with the acceptance of our new policy which will, in essence, give the green light to participation in the social environments of the web, the problem still remains that the library system I work for does not pay much more than lip service to its web branch (their word not mine) — no staffing, no budget, and no real authority. I’m working to change that – today begins a new week.