Provocation leah

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Leah Krevit Rice University The Rest of Us novators, Early opters, and the Rest of Us Stephen Abram John Blyberg Leah Krevit as Library Association Annual Conference 201

Transcript of Provocation leah

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Leah KrevitRice University

The Rest of Us

Innovators, Early Adopters, and the

Rest of Us

Stephen AbramJohn

BlybergLeah Krevit

Texas Library Association Annual Conference 2010

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Provocation #1

Consensus makes innovation in libraries impossible

• It unfairly tips the decision-making scales towards a staff member who may simply like existing conditions, which may continue to exist long after the majority would like the conditions changed. Consensus building has the potential to reward the least accommodating group of staff members while punishing those trying to innovate.

• By giving all group or staff members the right to block any idea or proposal, an organization can essentially be held hostage to an inflexible minority or an individual. The impact this has on a library's ability to create innovative library services can be significant since creative or alternative ideas can be blocked or slowed by a small minority.

Walt Crawford (and Eric Schnell), Library Leadership Network blog. July 28, 2009

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Provocation #2

Libraries must shift to the Principle of Good Enough

Wikipedia: POGE is a rule for software and systems design. It favours quick-and-simple (but potentially extensible) designs over elaborate systems designed by committees. Once the quick-and-simple design is deployed, it can then evolve as needed, driven by user requirements. Ethernet, the Internet protocol and the World Wide Web are good examples of this kind of design.

Examples of this in library activities:• Open source/extensible library catalogs• Less than perfect cataloging• Lower resolution scanning• New tools that change so fast you might as well throw them out there for

people to use now!

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Provocation #3Libraries must incorporate The Cult of Done Manifesto into their culture

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. 2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.There is no editing stage.

4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.

Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.Once you're done you can throw it away.

8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.Destruction is a variant of done. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

13. Done is the engine of more.

--Bre Pettis (I Make Things) March, 2009

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Provocation #4

Libraries will stop providing in-person services• All services (reference, circulation, instruction, etc.)

will be unmediated and supported by technology• Successful libraries will have identified shared goals

with teaching faculty and adapted themselves to work at the intersection of librarianship, information technology and instructional technology

--Taiga 4 Forum Provocative Statements

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Provocation #5

Collection development as we know it is dead

• CFP: Patron-Initiated Collection Development (special issue of Collection Management)

Patron-Initiated Collection Development: Current Successes and Future Directions

To be published in v. 35, no. 3/4 of Collection Management in 2010.

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Provocation #6

Libraries must bring more members of the Creative Class into the organization.

Wikipedia: The primary job function of its members is to be creative and innovative. “Along with problem solving, their work may entail problem finding” (Florida, 2002, p. 69).

• We are making things for them• They are making things for us• Some of them are already librarians• Some of them are not• Get as many Creatives as you can

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