Every community is unique, and for students a library provides ‘the feeling of knowledge, the smell and the furniture of success, the lighting and the ambiance to de-stress,’ that is what a graduate student told us during our last project. The library service fits into a bigger picture and that is why we need to plan for the future.
Transform Work / Use the Library
How are we going to transform work and education when we can’t collaborate in our libraries? According to “After the Pandemic, a Revolution in Education and Work Awaits,” Ravi Kumar states the accelerations in digitization and globalization are steadily making more work “modular,’’ broken up into small packets that are farmed out by companies. Companies, he argues, will increasingly become platforms that synthesize and orchestrate these modular packets to make products and services. If this is true, how will you determine what type of library service your company needs and how best these services can be delivered to the community?
Collaborative Planning
We believe that collaborative planning will uncover the user needs to determine the “just in time” collections/services and the “just in case” experiences. We developed digital asset management systems for large organizations and digital libraries for colleges, universities and public library systems. As a result, we learned you might try to avoid it by understanding your value. This will help you ensure that the process is well organized and informed.
Planning for Your Community
Librarianship is an academic discipline in its own right and based on modular research. Cataloging and technical services is a provision of the library backend that most people don’t know about. For years, librarians have organized collections primarily in and through our community libraries, special collections and archives. They are dedicated professionals that provide access to authoritative resources, in terms of books, digital collections, technology, staff and buildings. We know that librarianship is an applied field and the library is a laboratory itself.
Your library is your Lab…
Kumar goes on to state, “As more work becomes modular, digitized and disconnected from an office or factory, many more diverse groups of people — those living in rural areas, minorities, stay-at-home moms and dads and those with disabilities — will be able to compete for it from their homes.” For public libraries, the greatest issue is to understand if there are unmet needs. We live in a changing world with opportunities to learn. Think about developing a needs assessment to support your community – this can be, for example, for education, cultural or business related “just in case” experience(s) and “just in time” collection(s).
Document Your Success and Win at Politics
It is essential to recognize that the development of public libraries and allocation of resources can be a political process. The library’s management emphases may have an effect on collection size as funding changes and priorities evolve. Our primary focus is to help libraries determine the right sort of information to show why changes are needed to library services and/or buildings. CONTACT US or read one of our past posts
Invest in a Needs Assessment
In order to build a better future, you need to invest in today. Each library needs to assess the impact of the growing community who uses digital resources and technology. What is required to provide access? is it a service or building or both? For instance, many libraries have built their collections on a variety of formats (print, video, media, etc.) and others have first generation digital services that still don’t encourage “just in case” access. The new work environment will require new types of employment and skills training.
Good Managers Undertake Challenges
Planning is part of good management and occurs at a range of levels in all organizations, but what happens when we stop developing a management plan? What happens when we forget what we are getting from our partners? Collaborative planning should be used to develop a library program for all the users in your community. The team approach can be used to describe the planning process used for a new/expanded digital library or a new building program.
