The Information Professional

By Amanda Clay Powers 

"The future of libraries is caught up in our ability to change and continually respond to the rapid changes around us. But in order to have meaningful change that will make our libraries thrive, rather than continually exhausting our resources, we have to find a way to discriminate among the changes we could make, implement the ones that make sense, and then keep them going while we continually evaluate them. But how can we ever keep up? And how can we become the libraries of the future when we are relied upon to be pillars of our communities, not revolutionaries? Well, lean in. I’m going to share with you the secrets I’ve learned from five years of applying social technologies in an academic library.

First—find yourself a geek with good tech radar and listen to her. Second, bring new ideas into the library any way you can. Third, set up a system to evaluate the resulting innovations that emerge from your library staff so you can sustain them. That’s it."

STEP ONE: CREATE YOUR GEEK FILTER COMMITTEE

STEP 2: BUILD A BROAD CONSENSUS