Informed Teacher Librarianship

Every day as a teacher-librarian, I try to match resources to students and students to resources.  In the stacks, it’s often quite easy to rely on Dewey and the alphabet for locating material, but ...

...Innovation to the rescue

I came across a librarian’s tweet that said “every conference, every speaker, every article, every LIS class – says we have to innovate.” At times it does seem like “every” is the word that best describes the amount of time academic librarians spend talking about innovation. I suspect the amount of time talking about it far exceeds actually doing it. At least there’s an understanding that innovation may enable us to solve some of our most wicked problems. On a smaller scale it may simply enable us to create better ways to provide valued services to our community members. I’m not sure if the tweet was a sign of “innovation fatigue” or a reflection on the importance of getting serious about innovation. Either way, the current innovation-centricity in libraryland, to my way of thinking, is a good thing if it will stimulate more academic librarians to build an innovation culture in their organizations. Most economists would argue that innovation is critical to America’s future if we want to be globally competitive. It leads to new products and services that satisfy needs, and even better if it’s something that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. That’s why we cannot ignore innovation. It may be our best hope for differentiating the academic libraries as a provider of unique services