Toward a Library Renaissance

Abstract

In the age of the internet, many think libraries are being destroyed. One need not yield to pessimism: identifiable trends point to a promising future. In light of these, one should be able to circumscribe plausible scenarios. Approaches to strategic planning that count on ownership should make a big difference and point to desirable skills for librarians. If they also invest in resilience and give unequivocal attention to branding, libraries can enjoy a renaissance.

These Knowledge Solutions reproduce a paper presented at a Satellite Meeting on Knowledge Management as a Vital Tool for Change Management held on 15 August 2014 in Lyon, France in advance of the 2014 IFLA World Library and Information Congress.

In a Word In the age of the internet, many think libraries are being destroyed. One need not yield to pessimism: identifiable trends point to a promising future. In light of these, one should be able to circumscribe plausible scenarios. Approaches to strategic planning that count on ownership should make a big difference and point to desirable skills for librarians. If they also invest in resilience and give unequivocal attention to branding, libraries can enjoy a renaissance.

On Alexandria and the Name of the Rose

To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads.

—Jon Bing

For centuries, librarians have tried to safeguard information, sometimes in the face of destruction. Think of the great Library of Alexandria,¹ the burning of which symbolizes the irretrievable loss of knowledge. Think also of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, and the (fictitious) fourteenth century story about the search for a “lost” volume of Aristotle that no one is allowed to read—but yet must be preserved—because it might reveal that Jesus could and did laugh, contrary to the death-obsessed zeitgeist of the time. Fast- forward to the age of the internet, when some fear libraries are again being destroyed² and many ask: “Who wants libraries when you have Google?”³ This is not an easy question to address but one need not yield to pessimism.⁴ These Knowledge Solutions argue that identifiable trends direct to a promising future: in light of these, one should be able to circumscribe plausible scenarios. Approaches to strategic planning that count on ownership should make a big difference and point to desirable skills for librarians. If they also invest in resilience and give unequivocal attention to branding, libraries can enjoy a renaissance.⁵

Wanted: Information Overload—Better, Knowledge Management—Specialists

We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today’s knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little.

— Mario Augusto Bunge

From our contemporary vantage point, it is well-nigh impossible to imagine how we could exist without the internet: we can—and are not to—work, study, shop, and play from a laptop or smartphone. On the other hand, since freelancing “seeders” proactively generate and share data and information , we are now awash in it. Google, for one, has greatly helped to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, its mission statement.

Information is ubiquitous because producing, manipulating, and disseminating it has become cheap and easy. The digital world provides a myriad means: distance no longer matters. We generate (create), collect (capture), store (record), process (manage), transmit (share), use (consume), recycle (discard), and plan (identify) information throughout the day. By means of the internet, electronic mail remains the communication channel of choice but instant messaging and social media are two technologies that increasingly challenge its preeminence.

Data smog, infobesity, infoxication, and—more frequently—information glut are fitting metaphors that describe the deluge of information we are experiencing. Information overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Where content abounds, cognitive and perceptual factors constrain consumption; Davenport and Beck (2001) define attention as focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. They coin the term “attention economy” to describe an environment where the scarcest resource is not ideas or even talent but attention itself. In the attention economy, channels of information constantly compete to attract the largest share of attention, leading to information overload. According to Simon (1971), “In a knowledge-rich world, progress does not lie in the direction of reading and writing information faster or storing more of it. Progress lies in the direction of extracting and exploiting the patterns of the world so that far less information needs to be read, written, or stored.”

… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention …

—Herbert Simon

In the twenty-first century, exploring the distinction between information and knowledge is a primary area of inquiry. Lest we forget, the time-honored function of librarians was precisely that: to curate⁶ knowledge, which entails pulling together, sifting through, selecting, and interpreting content. Today, by filtering the wealth of information into meaningful insights, they can find the signal in the noise and both energize and synchronize communities and networks of interest and practice. Working across contents, structures, and stakeholders, librarians can turn disruptive chaos into creative clusters. To maximize outreach, librarians must in the “Age of Knowledge” consider what transformations challenge the value of libraries to clients, audiences, and partners recognize opportunities to engage with design thinking⁷ in new forms and functions of “knowledge work”.⁸ Storage aside, what are the most valuable products and services that they can deliver?

Key Trends Affecting Libraries

Doubtlessly, many librarians would welcome a vision of the future that foresees a growing need for libraries because of recent advances in social media, mobile computing, and open data. But, there is danger in counting on such trends if libraries fail in any case to demonstrate the value of the products and services they must now provide in both physical and virtual⁹ settings and in a variety of formats.

Thomas Frey (n.d.) of the DaVinci Institute identifies 10 trends. Paraphrasing and reordering:

I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

• Trend No. 1—The demand for information is growing very rapidly.

• Trend No. 2—The stage is being set for global cultural, economic, political , social, and technological systems.

• Trend No. 3—Information and communications technology is constantly shaping the way people tap information.

• Trend No. 4—We have not reached the smallest particle for storage capacity but may soon.

• Trend No. 5—Search technology is becoming increasingly complex.

• Trend No. 6—Busyness is driving the lifestyles of library users.

• Trend No. 7—We are transitioning to a verbal society, less reliant on the keyboard.

• Trend No. 8—We are shifting from product to experience-based lifestyles.

• Trend No. 9—Many libraries are morphing into centers of culture.

• Trend No. 10—The information and communications technology we currently depend on will ineluctably become obsolete.

Pure Scenarios for Future Libraries

Libraries are fundamental to teaching and learning: one might think that this is enough to endear them to us. However, the world is and will continue to be an ever-changing place. Based on a horizon scan and a political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE) analysis of the environment for higher education and libraries, the Academic Libraries of the Future project¹⁰ fleshed out three (somewhat exaggerated) scenarios for libraries, positioned along open–closed and market–state axes:

• The Wild West Scenario—Under this scenario, private providers compete with one another and with governments to offer consumers information services and learning material. The power lies in the hands of the consumers, who are able to pick and choose from materials to create a personal experience.

• The Beehive Scenario—Under this scenario, for instance in the education sector, governments remain the primary funder and controller of information services and learning material. The overarching goal is to produce a skilled workforce, created mostly by largely homogenous higher education systems for the masses while allowing elites to attend private institutions . A limited market is used to provide competition in higher education and drive up quality.

• The Walled Garden Scenario—Under this scenario, for instance in the education sector, the closed nature of society makes higher education systems insular and inward-looking, isolated from other institutions by competing value systems. Here, the provision of information services is as much concerned with protecting own materials as it is with enabling access.

Enter Future Search Conferencing

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

—Noam Chomsky

Fatigue pervades organizations that cannot learn to change. Tell-tale signs are (i) senior management and change sponsors do not attend progress reviews; (ii) there is reluctance to share, perhaps even comment on, information about the change effort; (iii) resources are given over to other strategic initiatives; (iv) clients, audiences, and partners demonstrate impatience with the duration of the change effort or increasingly question its objectives; and (v) managers, champions, and agents are stressed out and the change team considers leaving. We should not forget that organizations are human institutions, not machines: people must understand and buy into the need for change if any meaningful progress toward a desired future is to be made at all. It is difficult and ultimately pointless to make people do what they do not want to do.

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

—Stephen Hawking

Futurists deal with probable, possible, preferable, and prospective futures.¹¹ Trend analysis, one of their tools, is valuable because moving with trends, not against them, is a logical undertaking. However, the patterns that trend analysis identifies can lead to organizational lock-in of the either–or, black-and-white variety the three outright scenarios may conduce; conversely, they may open too many unrealizable vistas. Trends analysis works best when accompanied by other techniques. Future Search conferencing has emerged as a system-wide strategic planning tool that enables diverse and potentially conflicting groups to find common ground for constructive action. After all, it stands to reason that, where the stakes are communal, people should work as a group to bring common sense to bear on organizational change.

Future Search conferencing was conceptualized to help organizations create shared visions and plot organizational directions linked to results over a 5–20-year horizon.¹² It is a three-day event structured to:

• Represent the system in one room;

• Explore the whole in context before seeking to act on parts, focusing on common ground and desired futures, and treating problems as information; and

• Self-manage work and take responsibility for action.

Future Search conferencing links inputs, activities, and outputs to result in a vision built on

• Appreciation of an organization’s history;

• Acknowledgment of present-day strengths and weaknesses; and

• Considered opinion about major opportunities in the future.

  

  Source Author

  Fig. A typical future search agenda.

Not a free-floating brainstorming exercise, Future Search conferencing is a carefully designed methodology linking inputs, activities, and outputs. In four or five sessions each lasting half a day, participants keep to the following in small groups or plenary sessions¹³:

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future—and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.

—Albert Camus

• Focus on the Past: Highlights and Milestones—In the first half-day, preferably after a warm-up allowing participants to converse with one another, the Future Search gets underway with a look at the past. The eight groups contribute historical information and compose timelines of key events in the world, their personal lives, and the history of the Future Search topic. The groups tell stories about each timeline and what implications the stories have for the work they have come to do. No items are too trivial and no individual dominates: forbearance on the beliefs and positions of others deepens comprehension and acceptance. This process creates a shared, global context for the Future Search.

• Focus on the Present: External Trends—Later, the entire assembly draws a mind map, ranks ongoing trends affecting the system the participants operate or exist in, and identifies which are most important in relation to the topic. This process clarifies what is impacting the organization.

• Focus on the Present: Responses to Trends—In the morning of the second day, the groups describe what they are doing about the key trends identified and explain what they plan to do in the future. This process helps assess current actions.

• Focus on the Present: Owning Actions—Later, the groups report on what they are proud of and sorry about in the way they are dealing with the Future Search topic. This process surfaces strengths and weaknesses in the organization and affords psychological safety for admission of errors.

• Focus on the Future: Ideal Scenarios—In the afternoon of the second day, the groups project themselves into the future and describe their preferred vision10 of the future as though it had already come about. This process generates a clear and powerful image of a healthy organization—and its values—through which the participants would like to advance their joint purpose, to be made real over the selected horizon.

• Discover Common Ground—Later, the groups post which they believe hold common—but not necessarily easy—ground for all participants. Disagreements are acknowledged without auxiliary discussion. This process enables participants to locate springboards for action, having elucidated what assumptions—e.g., the nature of society, the means of social change, and the attributes and roles of knowledge—underpin each.

• Confirm Common Ground—In the morning of the third day, the entire assembly dialogues to agree on common ground. This process helps participants conceptualize behaviors for cooperative ventures.

• Plan Actions—In the afternoon of the third day, champions throughout the organization sign up to implement action plans. Of course, authority, resources, and arrangements for action are confirmed by reality checks. Participants walk out of the assembly room committed and ready to accomplish the envisioned future based on a more cogent framework that connects values and actions in new relationships and real time. This process formulates mutually supportive, practicable sets of rapid undertakings for individuals, groups, and the organization they are members of, close follow-up which will determine whether change has occurred.

Here too, Thomas Frey’s recommendations for libraries deserve mention, if only because many of them have to do with the sort of conversations that Future Search conferencing engenders. Paraphrasing and expanding, he advises them to:

The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.

—John Lasseter

• Evaluate the Library Experience—Libraries can survey the opinions and suggestions of clients, audiences, and partners to grasp what matters most to them. The patrons are the community at large and the people who walk through the library doors.

• Embrace New Information and Communications Technology—Information and communications technology is being introduced on a daily basis and most people are at a loss when it comes to deciding what to use or what to stay away from. Because no organization has taken the lead in helping the general public to understand new technology where there are opportunities for libraries to become centers of digital learning and points of reference—culture (including recreation), research, innovation, etc.—for local communities: they can, for instance, create technology advisory boards; enroll technology-savvy members of the community to hold monthly discussions that the community at large would be invited to join; and organize guest lecture series on technology—this is quite converse to the idea that the internet will make them superfluous or irrelevant.¹⁴

• Preserve the Memories of Their Own Communities—The historical memories of a community amount to much, much more than a few documents: they embody many forms that should not disappear and libraries have a quintessential role to play.¹⁵

• Experiment with Creative Spaces so the Future Role of the Library Can Define Itself—Because the role of libraries, 20 years hence have changed and will likely embrace multiple new forms and functions, libraries can design creative spaces to enable clients, audiences, and partners, not forgetting staff, to experiment and determine what ideas draw attention and get traction. With social innovation, possible uses for creative spaces include art studios; band practice rooms; blogger stations; cybercafés; daycare facilities; drama studios; exercise bicycles and treadmills; gamer stations; imagination rooms; mini-theaters; podcast studios; recording studios; video studios; and virtual world stations.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.

—George Bernard Shaw

Since, they juxtapose also the Wild West, Beehive, and Walled Garden scenarios described earlier, it is relevant to note Thomas Frey’s three configurations for libraries. He calls them the Time Capsule Room (n.d.), the Search Command Center (n.d.), and the Electronic Outpost (n.d.). Not an “official story,” the Time Capsule Room would preserve and make accessible sensory information about the essence of community in audio, video, and image forms (Over time, new technologies may capture frequencies, pressures, smells, tastes, textures, vibrations, and other situational attributes.) To establish a library as a center of gravity for exploration, the Search Command Center would draw attention to databases, specialized search engines, and other available resources; provide expert, hands-on assistance in finding and using databases; and teach patrons how to access information remotely. To extend the digital world to efficiently run community gathering places, the Electronic Outpost would in different shapes and sizes, and for varying purposes, serve as the satellite branch of a central library; some outposts would offer selections of digital tablets and book readers; others would feature daycare centers, gamer stations, mini-theaters, working studios, etc., perhaps also a Search Command Center.

It’s easy to run to others. It’s so hard to stand on one’s own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It’s easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.

—Ayn Rand

A Skills Framework for Librarians

Creating a shared vision and plotting organizational directions is one thing but delivering the dream is another. At a time when increasingly advanced skills are required for success in life and work, all libraries must retool. Competence is the state or quality of being adequately or well qualified to deliver a specific task, action, or function successfully. It is also a specific range of knowledge, skills, or behaviors utilized to improve performance. Today, sustainable competitive advantage derives from strenuous efforts to identify, cultivate, and exploit an organization’s core competencies, the tangible fruits of which are products and services that anticipate and meet demand. (Yesteryear, instead of strengthening the roots of competitiveness, the accent was placed on business units. Innately, given their defining characteristics, business units under invest in core competencies, incarcerate resources, and bind innovation—when they do not stifle it.)

Core competencies are integrated and harmonized abilities that provide potential access to markets; create and deliver value to audiences, clients, and partners there; and are difficult for competitors to imitate. They depend on relentless design of strategic architecture, deployment of competence carriers, and commitment to collaborate across silos. They are the product of collective learning. The Five Competencies Framework that ADB’s (2008–) Knowledge Solutions series promotes and aims to build strengths in the areas of strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms , knowledge sharing and learning, and knowledge capture and storage. Over the medium- to long-term, libraries may need to build competencies in the first two areas, and unremittingly strengthen abilities in the other three.

More immediately, citing the Institute of Museum and Library Services (2009),¹⁶ a skills framework (particularized to the configuration of each library) would likely comprise:

You have no idea how eager I am to ensure that the notion of library does not disappear – it’s too important. But the thing is, it’s going to have to curate an extremely broad range of materials, and increasingly digital content.

—Vint Cerf

• Learning and Innovation Skills, e.g., critical thinking and problem solving; creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration; visual literacy; scientific and numerical literacy; cross-disciplinary thinking; and basic literacy.

• Information, Media, and Technology Skills, e.g., information literacy; media literacy; and information, communications, and technology literacy.

• Life and Career Skills, e.g., flexibility and adaptability; initiative and self-direction; social and cross-cultural skills; productivity and accountability ; and leadership and responsibility.

• Twenty-First Century Themes, e.g., global awareness; financial, economic, business, and entrepreneurial literacy; civic literacy; health literacy; and environmental literacy.

Toward Resilience, Not just Sustainability

Organizations must be resilient if they are to survive and thrive in turbulent times: it is no longer sufficient to throw efforts at strategy, structure, and systems, parameters that lie mainly within an organization’s boundaries. In today’s dynamic and complex environment, enduring success requires organizational agility across boundaries. In the century of complexity, organizations must be “in the making” and the locus of attention must become purpose, processes, and people, the vital factors that Future Search conferencing investigates.

Libraries must accommodate environmental turbulence and effectively manage disruptive change and its pace to engage, adapt, and recover; to capture or realize opportunity; and in some cases to actually morph to become stronger on account of the experience. With newfound purpose from Future Search conferencing, investments in three areas would assuredly move libraries from passivity to action¹⁷:

• Leadership and Culture—which define the adaptive capacity of the organization.

• Networks—which amount to the internal and external relationships fostered and developed for the organization to leverage when needed.

• Change Readiness—which signifies the planning undertaken and direction established to enable the organization to be change-ready.

Investments in leadership and culture relate to leadership, staff engagement, situation awareness, decision making, and creativity and innovation. Investments in networks relate to effective partnerships, leveraging knowledge, breaking silos, and internal resources. Investments in change readiness relate to unity of purpose, proactive posture, planning strategies, and stress-testing plans.

A Postscript on Branding

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Irrespective of configuration, libraries must in addition do more about branding. Branding is a means to identify an organization’s products or services, differentiate them from others, and create and maintain an image that encourages confidence among clients, audiences, and partners. Until the mid-1990s, brand management—based on the 4Ps of product (or service), place, price, and promotion—aimed to engineer additional value from single brands. The idea of organizational branding has since matured to embrace relational capital, with implications for behavior, and is making inroads in the public sector too. Marketers have come to agree that the parties to a transaction are in fact exchanging one behavior with another as individuals or communities: they do not just “transact”. And so, if relationships—in other words, supply chains—are crucial to marketing and marketing is not an act but a habit, libraries should do the following:

• Think in terms of social capital and relationships, which requires that they plan for the long-term and build brand equity accordingly.

• Consider what deep-seated values relate to the behaviors of targeted end users and ascertain better what value and motivational attributes products and services have from the perspective of end users.

• Focus, simplify, and organize products and services by emphasizing and facilitating and understanding of unique selling propositions, which demands that for all products and services they look at the why, what, how, when, where, and who of end user behaviors.

• Bring more and different partners together to initiate and deploy synergies.

• Constantly, monitor and evaluate efforts by surveying the perceptions of end users.

• Visualize marketing as change management, the success of which hinges on explicit consideration of relevant determinants of intraorganizational behaviors throughout marketing activities, institutions , and processes.

• Accept that organizational behavior is central to marketing and branding: it is a management philosophy for organizational practice; a strategy that relates to end users; an organizational tool for structuring and infusing teams; a tactic with which to drive inputs; and a measurement of the relevance, efficiency, efficacy, impact, and sustainability of activities, outputs, and outcomes.