Decoupling Preservation from Service

I heard Matt Goldner, the Executive Director of End User Services at OCLC talk yesterday at the NISO Resource Sharing Forum. Primarily, his talk was about recalibrating the library to be user-focused and creating tools that allow for users to easily find those things which interest them. At one point he said something about how he wasn’t speaking out against the purpose of collecting and preserving the cultural memory…it was just that he was speaking for user-focused library missions. And this statement (almost an apology for coming near the suggestion that collecting and preserving the cultural memory is a lesser goal than user satisfaction) brought up some ideas for me that might benefit the library community.

The tension exists in every academic library I’ve worked in between retaining content “just in case” and removing content because it isn’t used and might be better delivered on demand or “just in time.” And I think that this tension limits our ability to serve our users. The feeling that we should protect our resources for the future causes us to do things that limit access, use, and service. Things like – having due dates, charging fines, repairing damaged books, binding journals and paperbacks, and spending vast resources on the storage of these resources.

But, are users really interested in our mostly self-imposed mission to save the world’s knowledge? And, if we are doing it, are we doing it effectively? (As an aside, I don’t think we are doing this effectively. We generally only preserve written history, and these days only a small portion of written history with the explosion of self-publishing through web tools. As well, there is an extraordinary volume of our knowledge culture that we don’t preserve.)

What if we de-coupled the goals of serving information to users and preserving the written culture? If libraries collaborated to archive the content we are worried about in a trusted, collaborative venue, then we can serve copies of these preserved artifacts to users in ways that free them of the confines of library imposed controls and preservation.

We live in a information resource-rich world now. We can develop resource-sharing systems and act in ways which assume that we will be able to get the information that users want in a timely fashion.

Let the protection of things happen… and let the service happen – separately if necessary.

Amazing how mission drives an organization

I was at the ARL "Library Management Skills Institute I: The Manager" session a couple weeks ago, and it was impressed on me how dramatically the values and perspectives of librarians changed depending on their respective organizations' missions.

I work for a library which has clearly articulated a strategic plan, mission, and values which says that service is one of our core principles. This "patron-first" vision frames the way we see things, and it comes straight from our Dean.

It is in this principle of service that our Dean has justified NOT moving toward ARL status as a library. This is a significant change from the previous administration which had placed ARL status as one of the library's priorities.

I came to K-State after this change, and, as Acquisitions Librarian, I saw the remnants of the ARL status goal fading away. Our selectors were still tempted to accept EVERY gift that came in the door in the name of raising book count statistics. Now, we are very targeted in the gifts we accept. We judge their value by how much they directly support the curriculum or the priority collecting areas we have targeted. And the guiding principle of "directly supporting the curriculum" is whether or not patrons will use the resources.

I think a lot about workflow efficiency, and, at the ARL training session last week, I was surprised by the number of conversations I had in which very inefficient workflows were described. But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I saw their workflows as inefficient because I am judging based on my organizations mission and values. The values and missions of these ARL libraries were different and demanded different workflows to achieve this mission. Those workflows may be quite efficient for their purposes and should be judged according to the goals they purport to achieve.

Still, I think that to some extent most organizations share the goals of speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness. And in that sense, it is still legitimate to judge a workflow based on the achievement of those goals.

Strategically Building Collections: Timberline 2008

Yesterday I presented at the Timberline Acquisitions Institute. I basically gave a profile of the kinds of changes that our library is undertaking. And, I focused particularly on the way that our new strategic plan has changed the way that we are thinking about collections and the processes surrounding our collections.

I see three fundamental ways that our library’s perspective of collections is changing:

1. we are using the goals of the strategic plan and the priorities that we have articulated in our collections to justify financial, human resources, and process decisions.

2. we are becoming more intentional about assessment; we are moving from a culture of speculation to a culture of assessment

3. we are broadening our definition of collections, not focusing on the physical and electronic resources we own (and lease), but thinking about the information needs of our users more broadly and accepting that there are many ways that those information needs can be met.