Time for a little R&D

Posted on February 23, 2009 
Filed Under Managing Ourselves, Managing Projects

Flipping through the Globe & Mail this weekend I ran across Gary Mason’s article “Scarcity of R&D driving top minds from Canada”.

Read the article, or the quotes I have here, and see how frighteningly well these concerns fit into a library context.

Mason was looking at the work of Dr. Gupta, a professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University and wondering “How did one make businesses in Canada wake up to the need to integrate research and innovation into their business plans?”

Mason wrote,

For Dr. Gupta, it made no sense that Canada was a net importer of research while being a huge exporter of research talent. Meantime, we were falling further behind the United States and others in terms of productivity and innovation.

Dr. Gupta found that,

in the U.S. if you ask a company why it does research it will look at you strange: “We do research because we have to develop our next product.”

and

In Canada, you ask and companies will say they don’t invest in a lot of research because it’s very expensive and they’re trying to make ends meet and it’s a luxury they can’t afford.

So, if research and development is part of a successful business plan, are we, as librarians, doing enough of it? We know we do it, that’s what conferences and publishing is about. A “spit it out in 10 seconds or walk the plank” list of library R&D includes SFU Library’s reSearcher, the highly collaborative Working Together Project, and Edmonton Public Library’s Library Services to Aboriginal People’s Report. And in 15 seconds I even remember that tomorrow morning I will be meeting with a committee to write the almost final draft of a research report that will result in improved measurement tools and better public service practices for collections.

After all, research and development is part of what we do as librarians. And we do it well. Right?

I’m not sure. Take a look at Roy Tennant’s post commenting on another blogger’s post about Google ( I give up, go to Roy’s Learning from Google post to follow the hyperlink trail).

If you didn’t go the post, here’s the sentence by Jeff Jarvis that prompted Roy’s response:

I would love to have worked for a company where at least the culture decrees that the default is smart and the expectation is learning and the response to problems is finding solutions.

Roy then notes that in the library world this is rare, He gives plenty of good reasons as to why this is so, He also suggests “that our very survival may depend” on operating more like Google in regards to how work gets done.

That darn Google. Are we going to let it best us at everything? No? Well then, how about getting together with some friends for a little R&D? The worst case scenario is that we might learn something.

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