I thought that the wide variety of readings about technology
plans this week were interesting and provided an adequate background for the
challenges of technological planning in a variety of different library settings.
One small complaint for me personally was that I felt like there weren’t a lot
of articles about technology planning in a university library environment. I am
guessing this is because university libraries already have to engage in
strategic planning and technology planning, while public and school libraries
only have to do it if they are seeking LSTA funding. So there would naturally
be more articles about how public libraries can get more involved in technology
planning, because it’s something they might not already be doing.
My favorite introductory article from this week was Stephens
“Technoplans vs. Technolust.” His emphasis on the importance of staff buy in
for plans and the idea that plans should be living documents that changes as
technologies and priorities change are just good sense for all types of
information organizations. The most important take home point from Stephens was
that planning for technology with users in mind is the best way to avoid
technolust. That seems easy enough to accomplish, but I can imagine that
reminding an over-excited technophile administrator of the actual
needs/wants/behaviors of users could be quite difficult. This is one advantage
of the current “big data” craze—now it is easier than ever to gather evidence about
user wants and behaviors.
Part of me thinks that technology plans are a bit redundant—most
of this stuff should be mentioned in a strategic plan. For instance, in the ALA strategic plan we
read, technology was a way of accomplishing almost every goal that was
mentioned. Technology is not separate from any operation of a library anymore. I
thought that this quote from Schuyler was especially well-put: “Technology is
not a result; it is an enabler. A library that has truly integrated technology
into its operations needs to separate plan because technology is incorporated
into every other planning document it has” (Schuyler 54). I also liked Schuyler’s
idea of peer review for technology plans (55). He’s right that really only the
systems librarians and IT people are capable of appreciating the content of
these plans anyway—an annual conference where plans are shared might help
develop some best practices and disseminate new ideas.
I do see myself somewhat involved with technology planning
activities in my future because I want to work in an academic library and would
like to eventually work in library administration. So all types of strategic
planning are interesting to me, especially seeing how it gets accomplished at
huge institutions with millions of dollars to spend. It has been mentioned in this course and in
the previous IT course I took (571) that the most important thing is just to
have an awareness of how networks and other technologies work in order to
facilitate communications with more specialized professionals. I feel like I
will use my knowledge gained in this course in the future.
Related to institutional planning, I was interested in
Chabrow’s idea of “failing fast”, or not keeping putting money into projects
that aren’t working. Instead, thinking smaller and more modularly so that
projects can be updated and changed without scrapping the whole thing. While
Chabrow was talking about the IRS, the idea of modular pieces made me think of
NARA. From Thibodeau’s original proposal, it seemed like a huge NARA digital
repository was never going to happen. However, I read a bit more about it in
673, and the modular way that the different aspects of the repository are being
constructed makes this huge project seem achievable.
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