Babysitting, washrooms, and obscurity
Posted on July 11, 2009
Filed Under Managing Ourselves
I’m not sure how I stumbled onto this (it may be through the DearReader.com Online Book Clubs that sends me 5 minutes of business reading each day - I think it supposed to encourage me to read more) but anyhow from Harvard Business Publishing I ran across the spot Measuring The Big Shift which in a very small part reads:
Companies must move beyond their fixation on getting bigger and more cost-effective to make the institutional innovations necessary to accelerate performance improvement as they add participants to their ecosystems, expanding learning and innovation in collaboration curves and creation spaces. Companies must move, in other words, from scalable efficiency to scalable learning and performance. Only then will they make the most of our new era’s fast-moving digital infrastructure.
Ooooooh. Once that juicy little bit is parsed out, it actually makes sense for libraries.
I know we actually don’t have a fixation on being cost effective - if we did many of our colleagues working as consultants or for big vendors would be out of work (meeeow) but we do have some unhealthy fixations with expansion (I didn’t say Second Life - did you say Second Life?) instead of making truly “institutional innovations” through reorganizing staff and other necessary resources for meeting community needs effectively. We add “participants” (well sorry not those of you with hiring freezes) and rarely think of performance improvement, never mind connecting learning to performance.
And no amount of monies spent on lobbying and advocacy is going to help us out of this self-designed obscurity. The world of information is moving fast, and we aren’t the information leaders. In fact we are barely keeping up.
While having these thoughts I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 Public Knowledge Project Conference key note speaker John Willinsky on why learning is a different type of intellectual property from say writing a song or a novel as there is a long standing tradition of scholarship and universities operating outside of the regular economy. Most importantly, economically, is that the nature of scholarship is that it’s true value is only realized when it is shared. Naturally he was expounding on the importance of open access and naturally I spun it into the importance of research and scholarship to the good management of libraries.
If we need to be learning organizations for our very survival, and if we think that librarians actually have a role in managing libraries, how is it that we have managed to become so fearful of research and scholarship? At least the academic librarians and many special librarians are openly struggling with it. Most of my colleagues in public librarianship will have nothing to do with it (as in the recent letter I received from a library school student who loves the learning atmosphere at the university library, but wants to enter public librarianship so she doesn’t have to do research or publish ??!!)
So there I am sitting in the Wosk Centre for Dialogue surrounded by folks involved in scholarship journals - editors, writers, academic and special librarians and it was like this year’s kick to the stomach at the Canadian Library Association conference - public librarians were noticeably absent from the discussion.
How much of a problem is it that public librarians don’t, in general, engage in scholarship? How can we be learning organizations without having the practice of formulating hypotheses/queries, researching/investigating and assessment?
And if we are not learning organizations, are we just housing materials, babysitting kids, and providing free washrooms and internet to the people?
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