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.