Webinar 6: Design Thinking and Managing Collections and Technology

welcome to this information services today webinar on design thinking and managing collections and technology this webinar addresses content from part 4 managing information organizations specifically focusing on chapters 23 24 and 25 this webinar is part of a ten webinar series representing the diverse authors and topics of the second edition of my book information services today an introduction as the editor I am thrilled to be presenting this webinar series in conjunction with my textbook information services today an introduction hearing directly from the contributing authors as they reflect and share their insight on today's information landscape is a unique opportunity to glean from their expertise both the opportunities and challenges that lie on the horizon Stephen Bell recently said it helps leaders to harness their own creative potential but they should also pay attention to creating the right culture and environment that lead to a creative library organization as a whole part 4 introduces readers to a range of management roles from developing a strategic plan to design thinking from collection management to managing the technological landscape of the information organization but part 4 also goes beyond these organizational roles to also look at how to manage the rapidly changing information organization this section provides guidance on how to foster innovation and strategic planning to make the information continually relevant to its community the section also has a dedicated focus on the management skills and competencies needed of today's information professionals to meet today's challenges in this webinar we'll be hearing from the authors of chapters chapters 23 24 and 25 from part four of the book chapter twenty three highlights strategies for innovation in the information organization by focusing on design thinking chapter 24 discusses collection management and the important role that strategic planning plays in ensuring a technologically to collection and chapter 25 explores management strategies for current and emerging technologies including automating operations and the new generation of technological resources of tremendous value to this book are its contributing authors these authors were were specifically chosen for their expertise passion and commitment not only to the field of information science but also to the professional development of tomorrow's information leaders I'd like to now introduce the panel of authors for this webinar Rachel Ivy Clark is current I'm currently an assistant professor at Syracuse University's School of Information studies her research focuses on the application of design methodologies and epistemologies to librarianship to facilitate the systematic purposeful design of library services rachel is the author of chapter 23 innovative library and information services the design thinking process Wayne T Disher is author of several text books including crash course and collection development and past director of library services at Hemet public library and he comes to us from the school of information at San Jose State University he is the author chapter 24 managing collections Marshall breeding is an expert in information technology a columnist for computers in libraries and the author of the annual Library System's report in the American libraries he is the author of chapter 24 managing technology there are six key themes that were identified for the second edition of information services today an introduction chapters 23 24 and 25 each address three of those key themes the their chapters address health libraries and information centers will remain valuable entities and their communities but also thrive but to thrive they will need to remain creative innovative and technologically advanced second new competencies rules and opportun for today's information professionals and the third theme that they adjust is the challenges and key issues of the field for the sustainability and essentialness of information organizations Rachael weaned and Marshall what is your interpretation of these themes and how do they specifically relate to your chapters content Rachael will begin with you thanks sandy the way that the themes relate to my chapter first of all Design Thinking is an iterative four stage process that I described in the chapter the four main phases being identifying a problem coming up with ideas to address that problem creating and implementing those ideas and then assessing and reflecting on those ideas and it's an iterative cycle so in this way that there's actually phases that support ideation and creation design thinking is massive support to creativity innovation and technological advancement it both focuses pre-existing skills in that space but it also offers a means for people to learn those skills people who might not inherently think of themselves as creative or innovative people it also reinventions roles for librarians and information professionals in terms of thinking or so of ourselves less as you know the traditional stewards of information and more as creators developers and designers of information tools and I think it also speaks to the theme of sustainability because it's an iterative process it's not just creating a tool and implementing it in your organization but there's an ongoing process of constant reflection and constant improvement thank you Rachel I'd like to now hear from Wing thanks Andy but the themes that are expressed in the book i've been some that i've been grappling with for at least a decade this idea that libraries face some questions about relevance in the future have some disturbing implications and interpretations and I had that in the back of my mind when I wrote this chapter you know my philosophy on library and collection management went through a bit of a transformation about seven or eight years ago when I was a library director in Southern California and our Community Services Department of the municipal government got a new person in in place and this person had absolutely no library experience and my city manager asked me to mentor this person and the first day we went out to lunch he asked me so Wayne what does the library without books look like I was completely dumbfounded I here I was a library director a library educator and I never once actually asked myself that question what does a library without books look like and here's the thing right he's probably not the only one who's thinking that particularly people in municipal government they have probably been asking this very question about library relevance so I I had this in the back of my mind when I wrote the chapter as a way to encourage readers to explore for themselves what it might mean to them to manage a library collection where the content is perhaps completely morphed into unexpected items something that we're not really sure will be and may even be non quintessential things and that's what I sort of took with the themes of this book as I wrote this chapter thank you Thank You Wayne so let's turn it over to Marshall well so in my chapter and a lot of the work that I do I think about kind of the strategic technologies that libraries need in order to kind of carry out their missions to remain viable and be successful in and what they do and in the chapter I cannae you take a pragmatic approach and I look at a lot of the kind of strategic technology infrastructure that libraries need in order to do that work a lot of information about resource management systems and discovery platforms and so forth that help the library kind of manage the collections provide excellence to it but it's important that information organizations gonna continually think about renewing their technology to make sure that they're keeping up with the need to support the ever-changing scholarly communication trends changing organizational priorities and kind of changes in technology itself also I'm very cognizant that you know there isn't one size fits all all the different kinds of information organizations need different kinds of support and technologies and kind of walk through kind of what some of those issues might be for organizations like a public library university library research and development centers corporate like information centers and so forth the trends in each of those are just so different and the case that there's just not one piece of software that will do it for each organization that often it's an integration of several different types of resource management and discovery services as we look at the next slide you know these come with a lot of associated implications what kind of competencies do information professionals need as all of these changes take place so the key points are to kind of think about it strategically and as a design and integration technology programs that best serve the organization thank you very much Marshall so I was wondering do any of you have any further observations or comments for each other on this on that aspect of themes and what your colleagues had to say well I noticed at the end there Marshall was using the word design so I just kind of want to point out that I see design as being embedded in all areas of library and information services so both in collections as Wayne mentioned and as Marshall mentioned as well I think something that's applicable across the board and that can help us investigate and perhaps address these problems like what I think Marshall makes a great point in terms of what is right for this particular context in this particular organization and it's always going to vary so being really aware of that and open to finding out what might be the right solution for the right context that's great thank you Rachel and Design Thinking could be one tool one wave to help it achieve that that's great excellent any other comments or observations okay okay we'll move on then so let's now direct our attention to today's information landscape the first edition of this book came out three years ago and as we know the field of Library and Information science is in constant flux what are some of the key changes as they relate to your chapters topic that have occurred since the first edition came out three years ago I'll turn to you Rachel first yeah so I think a big thing that we've seen is the rise of interest in design thinking across the board just in general it's really taken off in the last couple of years you can see here's just something I pulled from Google's Ngram looking at the phrase and and the prevalence of the phrase design thinking and literature it's gaining traction in a lot of different domains it's being applied in business it's being applied in education I know as we can see from the next slide I'm especially excited to see how it's being increasingly adopted in librarianship and other related information professions so places like our hosts Public Library in Denmark or the Chicago Public Library have really been explicit about embracing design thinking in their work there's a new design thinking for libraries toolkit that was developed by I do the design firm in conjunction with these libraries Library Journal is starting to offer online courses in education in applying design thinking in your library which is also applicable to many other information institutions and I'm really excited to see design-thinking being increasingly incorporated in lis education and things like MLAs programs I know San Jose State recently introduced a course specifically in design thinking so I'm really excited to see this rise of interest in the Design Thinking space in Library and Information professions Thank You Rachael and Wayne what are your thoughts well it's kind of funny when I think back on the inks that I had revised in the chapter while initially there had been this huge explosion of the popularity in ebooks when when I was asked to revise the chapter I was reading new data that was kind of showing the opposite that the popularity of ebooks was waning so rather than get caught up in the debate on the popularity of certain formats and collections because let's face it there's always gonna be an ebb and flow of the types of questions in our libraries I wanted to encourage readers to think about how collections could be used rather than how much they will be used and I want readers to then to think about the possibilities that new formats like digitization offer for example new points of access or content creation as an example one trend I'm seeing right now that really points out the need for some more creative collection management strategy that I advocate in the chapter is in inventory control because I see library staff are extremely transaction focused and we spend a huge amount of time moving books from one point to another and and tracking how many times we use physical stuff and we control how many and how long and how how we move this stuff around libraries and I think that in a digital world and as we move on to the 21st century that were these sort of transactions are going to be less meaningful in the library world so how can we learn from models like amazon.com or Netflix where libraries are focusing more on downloading and how to get user from from coming into the library to check something out to downloading or moving them to a different business model so making it more economically reasonable I think to both the business and the end user so these I believe are the issues that tomorrow's collection managers are going to be focusing on and I hope I eat encouraged that in my chapter thank you very much Wayne and Marshall so in the technology realm it's really interesting to think about how quickly things change they change very quickly but how quickly are they changed in the library world sometimes not quite as fast so as you know you have to kind of both think about the technologies available and kind of the broad industry and then how they've been implemented in libraries and other informational organizations so that the big change has been kind of more pervasive use of cloud computing that more and more organizations are shifting away from systems maybe they implement it locally to those that are hosted by a vendor or or more and more that are truly kind of multi-tenant platforms there's more thinking about kind of bringing in new aspects of functionality beyond traditional resource management things like customer relationship management you know how can a library kind of build information build a data warehouse about their user population and demographics in order to be able to start thinking more strategically about how to shape their services and deliver customized services to to their customers again the need for kind of data-driven decision-making to be strategic about the way that libraries and other organizations kind of make decisions both strategic and operational based on real data and look at the next slide quickly you know to adapt to the changing milieu that we see in customer and consumer technologies and how scaloppine occations is changing and so forth the changes in our larger world certainly impact how libraries need to implement technology in order to be able to best deliver this their services the media are going to change constantly ever changing mixtures of digital electronic and print content and we're seeing broad changes in the realm of spelling communications especially a lot of consolidation surrounding workflow tools analytics and and peer review tools and those kinds of things that again impact the way that library that organizations consume information might access to it Thank You Marshall so I personally am really excited that we are able to add the area of design thinking into into this book and into the webinar series as well it's something that as Rachel pointed out is something that has really taken on a strong focus in the field of library information science and and taken from outside outside the field of library information and science and also the really interesting changes in the areas of collections and technology as well I want to open up to our speakers to see if they had any observations or comments or questions for each other that they would like to add okay well then we will continue on to the next the next part so so now let's direct our attention to the future so what trends or emerging issues will impact the field of Library and Information science as it relates to your chapters topic so Rachel yeah so I think one of the the big elephants in the room with design thinking is the pushback is design thinking just a fad is it just a trend that's going to drop off and there's as you can see I just grabbed a selection of headlines that have been written about this the sort of already backlash against design-thinking and my reaction to that and people in lis who are interested in design thinking is to say that design thinking is just one aspect of design that we might be able to draw on in our work if we look for example at the chart on the next slide we can see the design is a huge space and there's a lot going on and obviously I don't have time in this webinar to get into this but things like user centered design participatory design critical design are all additional techniques and principles within the design world that we can be drawing on and where I think this becomes an important issue in our field is the idea of values and being really sensitive to the values especially in the library profession but also information professions at large we're seeing a lot of things emerge right now issues like bias and algorithms and how did they get there how does it get there how does it get embedded and how do we combat that and thinking about design in a very explicit way as opposed to just sort of going along sort of tacitly or implicitly I think can really help future information professionals think about these types of issues how do we design better technology systems in our library that supports the values of libraries how do we design collections like Wayne was talking about that are support these new downloading models or more like Amazon and Netflix but that also incorporate library values as opposed to maybe more commercial values that's a big issue that I'm seeing emerging in the field at large and a place where I think design might be able to help thank you Thank You Rachel I mean what are your thoughts well as I think about the future collection management specifically the one thing that I tried to emphasize in the chapter was a need for students and and readers to think strategically and to always involve the community in that process so the one thing that immediately comes to mind as we've been talking about my the previous slide and as we were just listening to design this idea for libraries the need to reevaluate the traditional idea of rationing our collection you know our entire surface model if you think about it is based on scarcity in the library world the idea that you can have it when you want it real isn't part of the mantra and I think our communities are getting frustrated with that there's a sense that because such a gigantic part of our collections are shared physically our users have to wait their turn to get in line - in order to get the material they want and the more interesting the item is the longer you'll have to wait right so this is something that our users are already perplexed about and this whole wait your turn and and and tolerate it it's not something that they're going to be happy with in the future the they need to figure this out and to solve this this resource sharing is pertinent I think and I discuss it in the chapter perhaps as we saw with the Netflix and Amazon accom the subscription model we see in the retail world would be one that we can adopt the ones that say if I'm a member then I have unmonitored slow but if I'm not then I don't it's probably the direction that we're going it's briefly real quickly I was on a plane talking to a city councilman and he was really surprised to hear that his local library offered free downloadable ebooks and when I explained that to him he got past his initial disbelief that this was possible and his first words were I suppose I suppose there's a long wait that's painful to me Thank You Lane all right Marshall what are your thoughts well so it's always kind of fun and interesting to think about where technology's going to be in the next 5 10 15 years and it's hard to to think in the very long-term but you can kind of look at the shorter term the two to three to five years a little bit make better projections about that so you know I you can already see kind of in the work some new platforms that I think will be interesting for libraries from Scandinavia Curie a platform for public libraries we hear a lot of talk about folio for academic and research libraries so those will be interesting things to watch as they likely play out in the next few years this shape of the industry has continually changed is going to change some more certainly in the direction of more consolidation more horizontal and and vertical consolidation where the technology products that libraries use are a little bit more interleaved with the discovery and content packages that they're involved with as well so that I think has important implications both on the content and technology side and then some interesting technologies that we're already seeing a lot of use of but you know there'll be more of that I think going forward you know a Semantic Web link data has been B key topic for the last four or five years so I think giving the next four or five years is going to be even more and even more recently we're seeing a lot of interest in virtual reality in artificial intelligence and machine learning there's been some interesting discovery services that are making use of machine learning to help users explore content and in big data is certainly a very large topic of interest how do how do we kind of create kind of large repositories of information about use and users and content that can be mined in order to be able to do analytics and decision-making to help libraries and other organizations kind of improve their services so there's a lot to think about a lot of possibilities and I have no real crystal ball Thank You Marshall so do you guys have any comments or questions for each other and further observations on this topic I just wanted oh I'm sorry go ahead I just want to recognize lanes anecdote with his City Council member I had a similar experience just as a patron of my local library where I discovered I could download streaming movies stream movies from my local library which is awesome but I was limited to 6 per month and with my librarian hat on I can you know hypothesize a lot of reasons why that might be the case but with my patron hat on I'm like why is this the case I don't I want it all and so when he said really resonated with me from both sides this idea of scarcity again but I'm really heartened by the fact that both Marshall and Rachel are talking about the need for strategic planning and I think that that that is exceptionally important and critical now for all the readers we're we're pretty good at knowing what our strengths and our weaknesses are but we fail I think to us also look at the opportunities and the threats and you know how will things like net neutrality affect us as we move toward these new service models in the future are there other threats or even opportunities that we can take advantage of as as librarians as we've moved forward so let's not forget about those those as well thank you did you want to add anything Marshall well along the same lines that you know you want to manage expectations they yell every has a lot of kind of interesting content that's digitally downloaded and so forth but a lot of restrictions on that and kind of realize that kind of the business and legal environment that we face is pretty adverse to be able to kind of go beyond some of the bounds that are kind of creating scarcity against this expectation for kind of unlimited use of content so I think we face some real challenges great thank you all we'll move on so we've addressed the changes of sorry we've addressed the changes of the past few years and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead at the core of the information landscape are the people who work in these organizations providing services to the communities that they serve this leads us to focus on focus information professional so what advice do you have for the new information professional to meet the needs of tomorrow's information landscape and based on your area of expertise what are some of the key competencies that information professionals will need to succeed in meeting the needs of the communities and organizations that they serve so we'll start with you first Rachel yeah so I know that there is much discussion about what are the competencies of the information professional of the future and a number of different competencies have been discussed I'm going to highlight three that I think are very critical and aligned with my chapter on design thinking and that's creativity problem-solving and flexibility and the reason that I want to emphasize these three is that I think they'll be applicable to current students current information professionals and people thinking about the future of the information professions regardless of what context you're in regardless if you're working in a public library or school library or some kind of corporate information setting I think all of these can serve the information professionals though because they're always going to be problems that need to be solved you're always going to be need be needing to think of new and creative ways to solve them and that's going to require a lot of flexibility just as we were just talking about in the discussion there are always legal constraints financial constraints resource constraints and so having flexibility to come up with creative solutions to address those is key I think design thinking is is one model that can offer people a way of trying to achieve some of these competencies it's by no means the only way but I think it's a very resonant way and I would my one piece of advice and preparing for tomorrow would be to encourage librarians and information professionals to treat their work explicitly like design work I think much of what we've done in the past has actually been designed and aligned with design thinking but we don't conceive of it in that way and so how much more powerful could we be if we harness some of the tools and principles of design to develop new ways to incorporate and support things like those library values or new technologies that are emerging thank you Rachel and Wayne what are your thoughts wow it's pretty great that I'm seeing now for myself the the beauty of having these three chapters together because there is so much dovetailing and and there is so much resonant about each one of us that could basically be written about any one of our topics but if I could boil down my chapter into just one one or two sentences is that if our current practices stay the same and the printed book goes away then we and I mean both collection developers and librarians could be in real trouble but I had some fear in writing the chapter because I really want to see people going out on professional blogs or Twitter and Facebook and saying hey did you read in this new textbook when districts said everything we're doing with books is worthless that's not true my point is just that some of the things that have worked fine for us in the past may be nearing their expiration date now and we need to be more proactive as a profession and be more prepared so my advice is not to hurry up and dump everything that has to do with printed books but rather to think strategic ways to start to reposition ourselves so that we will be viable in the future without books if that becomes necessary so we need to reframe the conversation and engage our colleagues and our staff members and our Provost's and our boards and our community members about these very questions a lot of our conversations on this topic have been explaining why books won't go away and I think that that doesn't really position us very well and I think that we what we really need to talk about is if books go away then this is what we will do and I hope that after reading the chapter that that's the the advice that we Thank You Wayne Marshall what are your thoughts well so again with technology you know it really is a very quickly changing world and of all the areas kind of professional development it's really important for those in the field to kind of constantly refresh their their expertise then and the awareness of the issues that are going on but relative to their own career context you know it's no the question is does everyone need to be technologists who works in these kind of organizations no not necessarily but since technology is so pervasive it really does require you know kind of a level of awareness and skill and information that is a challenge to keep up today you know those of us who started in the profession many years ago you know we just knew what we knew then would be pretty useless today so just constant renewal of information and skills and what's the right blend kind of high level information you know how much kind of understanding of ongoing trends how much hands-on expertise with with software and systems kind of all relative to your particular you know subject domain of what you're doing in employee or organization so it's a component of a kind of broader set of the you know information experiences that that have to be continually cultivated and then it's the emerging trends that I think are pretty interesting and important to to be aware of that you know it's important to kind of invest the right amount of time you know I realize that time is limited but to be selective about you know which tools to invest in learning which kind of trends to keep your eye on and how and think about how they're going to change you know the world that you work in and focus on the ones you know that actually have the most promise as it seems to you to be relevant you and your organization advance and how to advance through kind of the next phase of your career so again I just closed and you know that information professionals initially be technologists but I think it's really important that they be tech savvy Thank You Marshall so those were a really great piece of pieces of advice and I do think that there's some good synergy across them do you guys have any questions or observations you'd like to make about these kinds of advice that you're giving to the information professionals I think creativity is is something that I'm seeing being more creative which if I'm honest is not something that librarians I've seen a lot in librarians being creative unless it's just a matter of putting up a display or putting up a nice billboard so there this idea of using our creative energy more is something that's going to be critical I think as we move forward looking at trends and and trying to think about what these trends mean not only right now but 5 10 15 years on the future and how they might apply great Rachel and Marshall did you have anything else well I just want to sort of piggyback on Wayne's comment about he is the word reframing which I really appreciated and I think that ties in to that creative ability and the idea that maybe we haven't traditionally found librarianship to have creativity but that reframing thinking about something from a new perspective or in a new light can help foster that I know a lot of people are afraid or intimidated to be quote-unquote creative and so maybe reframing is a good phrase to use to help people sort of get over their intimation a little bit yeah I certainly like that the because of the fact that reframing allows us to think about not only what we see but also what our communities and our users see I think that's really important that we need to be able to involve our users in and asking them what do they see us being you know 20 15 years down the down the road and - for us to listen you know we we have these biases in our own minds about what we think library services should be like or what information services should be like in the future and it could be something completely different than what our users think and we need to not only ask but also not be afraid to listen Thank You Wayne great also I'd like to thank Rachel Ivy Clark Wayne Disher and Marshall breeding for joining us in this webinar on design thinking and managing collections and technology I am grateful for the insights and advice that you've shared today in this webinar and for your contributions to information and services today an introduction to the listener thank you for joining us I hope you have gained a deeper understanding of the changes challenges and opportunities in the field of Library and Information science and for more information check out the supplementary supplementary materials that are available to you via the online supplements so thank you again

2022-01-15 06:29

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