What if your library became the place where your organization’s future is invented daily? What if, instead of housing yesterday’s knowledge, it generated tomorrow’s breakthroughs? These questions, posed by Schmidt (2019) in “Future-making in the present: Critical design and libraries”, challenge us to reimagine libraries as “future-making spaces” rather than “past-preserving places”. Indeed, our research in library space planning and service design focuses on transforming an organization through library planning. It requires a systematic approach grounded in research and best practices:
Stakeholder Needs
Uncover the user needs and unspoken vision of your community through ethnographic research methods. Aaron Cohen Associates, LTD provides a comprehensive toolkit in *Library Trends* for conducting such investigations.
Building Programs
Test library planning ideas in small scales before full implementation. The “programming of spaces” concept, as described by Somerville and Collins (2018) in “New Library World”, allows for low-risk experimentation.
Trends and Metrics
Move to understand building measurements, analyze knowledge creation, collaboration quality, and seating configuration. According to Oakleaf (2020) in “College & Research Libraries”, generating a new framework for assessing library impact on organizational learning is part of the process.
Long Term Evolution
We believe that you need to build change into the DNA of your library plan. You need to experiment and creating systems that learn and adapt. This requires what Dempsey (2016) calls “inside-out libraries” in “EDUCAUSE Review”, where services evolve based on user behavior rather than predetermined models. This isn’t merely about reorganizing books or upgrading computer spaces. It’s about reimagining the library as a community of practice. I believe its the beating heart of organizational intelligence—a space/place where information transforms into insight, where individuals become communities, and where the possible becomes inevitable.
The Library as Organizational Soul
A transformative library plan does more than optimize space or modernize services. It fundamentally alters how an organization perceives itself and its potential. When we design libraries as crucibles of community knowledge rather than warehouses of information, we create the conditions for organizational metamorphosis. As Mathews and Burke (2016) conclude in their groundbreaking study in *Journal of Library Administration*, “the library that transforms its organization is first transformed by its vision of what human knowledge communities can become.”
Transform the Library Plan
The question isn’t whether your organization needs a library. The question is: What kind of future do you want to create, and how can your library plan serve as the blueprint for that transformation?
