Developing a Shared Vision for the Library of the Future

Every successful library project begins with floor plans, and an opportunity to develop the future. Basically, start your library planning and analysis by asking this question: What do we most want this institution to become? The architecture, the collections, the technology, and the service model will follow from your analysis. Indeed, opportunities are rarely self-evident. They must be discovered, articulated, and agreed upon before the first line is drawn. This is user engagement work and vision development, and it is foundation of our library planning methodology.

Vision development is an opportunity to use your imagination. We normally ask library staff and stakeholders to project what the library will look like in five years forward. We ask them to describe, in realistic and concrete terms, the access and service plan it needs. The workshop or exercise is part speculative dreaming and objective analysis. It is part of the architectural construction process and critical to the roadmap you create. Certainly, shared futures affect every subsequent design decision and outcome.

What do we want to create?

Five-Year Horizon

Shared Vision

Set the clock forward. Imagine that five years have passed and the library you most wanted to create now stands around you. Your task, as a library leader, is to describe it. What do you wish to see? What do you realistically think you will see, try to walk through, and visualize.

Developing future vision or forward projection is the heart of the user engagement and/or library planning workshop.

We have experienced libraries that were liberated at the end of this exercise. They were aligned as a community. Yes, they saw the constraints of present circumstance (funding, space, etc.), and its holding them back. This is why libraries should invest in the future. Learning through user engagement enables you to feel it now, the future and the future backward.

Every member of library community should have the opportunity to respond to each of the sample questions that follow. The vision belongs to all of them, and it holds only if all of them have shaped it.

What do we want to create?

Questions for the Future Library (Shared Vision)

Working from the five-year vantage point, the community considers:

Who are the stakeholders of the library & organization we have inherited?
How do we work with them, and how do we produce value for them?
What are the most influential trends shaping libraries, museums and research institutes?
What is our image in the community, and how do we compete to become the “third space” is it a place beyond home and work where people choose to gather?
What is our unique contribution to the world around us?
What is the impact of our library?
How do we fund a capital project of this scale?
What does the library look like, and how do the essential elements of its infrastructure interact with one another?
How do we handle the good times, and how do we handle the bad?
What are our values? How are people recognized?
How do we know the future library is secure? What have we done to ensure its future for ourselves — and for our grandchildren?
What, finally, is the library’s role in our community?

These questions do more than gather opinions. They force a community to reconcile ambition with responsibility, aspiration with endurance.

Returning to the Present:

Shared Vision

Imagination is part of the library staffs job; they are important and critical when you zoom in and out of the vision work. Once the future has been described, library staff / user engagement workshops need to return to reality. Here, we develop service planning reports to illustrate the operations as it exists today. Basically, library programming is zooming out to the five-year horizon and back to the present year.

Our work provides an honest assessment; we produces plans that build on opportunities.

Grounded in the present, you can try these service planning and development questions:

What are the critical forces acting on our library? Is it the system of funding?
Who are the current stakeholders? Who uses the building, on the adjacent property, and throughout the community or institution?
Which aspects of our library service empowers people?
Which aspects disempower our users? Are students and adults, children and mature adults has the same issues?
What major losses do we fear?
How is the strategic plan currently used?

Naming what the organization does not yet understand about itself is often the most valuable outcome of the entire exercise.

From Vision to Value

The purpose of user engagement is not to produce just a report. It is to transform how library groups within the community understands themselves, and how it works for them.

We help our clients develop an image of themselves as library institutions. We know they are passionate about their library; they add value to the lives of their users. When libraries move through this process, they begin to ask more demanding questions. For example, what is the true impact of our work?

The data gathering workshop we are describing here helps reframes everything. It moves library beyond the narrow task of designing space plans and programs, and toward the larger task of describing strategic and future goals.

The vision that emerges is expansive. It describes winning as library. For many libraries, they are already a place of world-class collections, and they have space for group learning. However, they are evolving and changing year after year. They need more work to understand what services are accessible, relevant and future-proof. As services integral to institution, the building becomes the physical expression of that vision rather than its substitute.

This is why vision development and design are on two different “train tracks during planning.” For example, space plans can reduce the vision if it is not settled. You may be faithfully solving the wrong problem. Library space plans drafted after user engagement is settled becomes an instrument of purpose.

Shared Ownership

The strength of library planning lies in how inclusively it was developed. Library strategies authored by a single leader, however capable, remains vulnerable to the future. The risks of turnover, shifting priorities, and the erosion of memory are a few factors to consider if your in a hurry. Library strategies authored by library leaders and community endures because it is distributed across many hands taking three to six months.

We know the reason the library projects fails. It lacks experts and stakeholder input. Basically, you must engage library experts and users. If the process is inefficient by design and it trades speed for durability, you will still be searching for an answer. Indeed, the library plan that results shouldn’t be the one that its leaders wanted; it is should be the one that its community chose.

Begin Here

Talk through the questions in this blog. Note, the temptation in any capital project is to move quickly to the tangible. We help our clients analyze the library site, the square footage, the shelving, interior design, architecture, accessibility, IT and the mechanical systems. These matters are essential, and they will come as part of the process. You want to get results. Make sure the planning report is sharable, honest, and forward-looking. Our library planning reports result in descriptions of what the institution intends to be and whom it intends to serve.

Describe the library you most want to create as though it already stands around you. Return to the present and reflect on what you have now. Without rushing, try to think about the distance between where you are now and where you want to be. Think about how you can get from here to there. Invite partners, leaders and users to voice their input. In your conversations, you will understand what the world is calling for..

Do this work well, and library blueprints will follow. The library will not merely house book collections. The library will support its purpose. The library’s future will be one secure enough to serve not only ourselves, but the generations who inherit what we build.