reflecting on the conference that wasn’t: change is not a dirty word

To my mind, the one constant theme throughout the SLQ unconference (besides technology) was change. It’s undeniable that if we’re going to get 2.0 (in the ethos-sense, not the technology sense) libraries need to change in a lot of ways, and most of them are to do with our culture. Some things that were identified as necessary changes during the course of the day really resonated with me:

• We need to embrace the concept of perpetual beta. People, internet users, our customers, do not expect perfection, but we persist with this culture of perfect. It’s no good waiting until we’ve perfected something to put it out in the public sphere – we need to let our services evolve. If Google, a company with so much invested in meeting users’ needs, can deliver services that are perpetually in beta, why can’t we? (And no, this doesn’t go against the idea of putting the need before the technology. I’m just advocating that once we’ve chosen the right technology, we shouldn’t get hung up on achieving perfection.)
• We must start taking risks. Carefully assessed risks, for sure. But take them we must. I’m a big believer in risk management strategies, but we need to focus on the management, and not so much on the risk itself. We can’t let the presence of risks stop us from innovating, from serving our customers as best we can. We just need to work out how we can minimise the effect of the risks that inevitably come with trying something new. And, moreover, we need to weigh the risks, their likelihood, and their manageability against the risks associated with not taking the ‘risky’ action. Because to fail to be a responsive, innovative organisation is a huge risk in itself.
• Embrace radical trust. And accept that trust is really not that radical. People are smarter than we give them credit for. We need to get over ourselves a bit and just give our customers (and our staff) the chance to surprise us.
• Accept that abandonment is a healthy practice. If we’re going to add new services, we must let go of some of the old ones. Certainly, we’re not going to (and indeed we shouldn’t) abandon everything we currently do: as Kathryn Greenhill says, we can keep the baby when we throw out the bath water – Web 2.0 is an adjunct to the services we already have, not a replacement for them. But we are very good at taking on more and more and more, and we must stop doing this before we stretch ourselves so thin that we’re no good to anyone. We should assess the services we currently provide and see where there’s room to rationalise. Moreover, it’s not just the ‘old stuff’ we should be abandoning: if we try a new “L2″ service and it doesn’t work, there is nothing wrong with abandoning it. In fact, if we give something new a good try and it doesn’t work, we’d be crazy not to abandon it. Abandonment is not admitting defeat. Rather, it’s tantamount to admitting just how astute we can be.
• We must see online services as core business. The things we do online, the services and collections we deliver online, are not just pretty little adjuncts to the ‘real’ work we do in library branches.Our strategic directions and goals, and indeed management support, should reiterate this. There is a very real, growing group of users who want to access our libraries from the comfort of their lounge rooms (or their offices). These users are just as legitimate as our in-person users, and our online services are just as much a core part of what we do as those services we deliver in-branch. The library website is a branch of the library. Every member of staff needs to understand that.
• Scatter the breadcrumbs. We’ve traditionally been focussed on the library website and OPAC as a single point of truth. This model may not be the right model for these times. We should scatter the breadcrumbs in places where our users hang out online. As one attendee said : “the perfect, all-in-one swiss army knife may not be a reasonable expectation”. We just may not be able to do everything we want to do or need to do within the constraints of the library website and/or OPAC. And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. I personally have been hung up on trying to figure out how to bring our sometimes dis-integrated services together. Maybe it’s not that big a deal.