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This messy, difficult thing is called innovation, and while it can cause angst for those who prefer stable dysfunctionality, it does make the Library ecosystem a richer and more diverse place. – Mark Leggott, LoomWare

Lately I’ve been feeling that work is especially messy and difficult, so I appreciated this quote from Mark Leggott (in response to the Stephen Abrams/SirsiDynix dust-up) that characterized such work as “innovation” and a breath of fresh air compared to “stable dysfunctionality.”

If I begin to think of innovation as something that is by its very nature messy and difficult I gain a new perspective on the work that is being carried out by myself and my colleagues. While it’s great when you can find solutions to real world problems and can experiment with and learn from multiple solutions, there is also the very real issue of each new project’s cascading effect on other services. I feel like as soon as we implement something, even if it’s the most elegant thing we ever saw, we launch a second phase of cleaning up everything else to work with the new paradigm. Is this a failing on my part in leadership, or a necessary evil of innovation?

The typical paradigm of the workplace would lead me to believe that the messiness and difficulty of innovation is something I should at least mitigate if not outright squelch. But what would an innovative culture, that encouraged and fostered innovation actually look like?

In imagining such a workplace I am aided by the recent work of Krisellen Maloney, Kristin Antelman, Kenning Arlitsch and John Butler, who undertook a large-scale investigation of Future Leaders’ Views on Organizational Culture. In both their LITA Forum session on the topic and their forthcoming article in College and Research Libraries, the authors examine the desired vs. perceived actual organizational cultures at the workplaces of a large number of “future library leaders.”

Unsurprisingly, they found that many future leaders are unhappy with the current culture and desire one with more emphasis on innovation with high flexibility and an external focus. (In particular they used the Competing Values Framework (CVF), which stipulates four models of organizations: Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy, and Market. The authors found that the Hierarchical model was the most prevalent while the Adhocracy was the most desired.)

The “Discussion” section of the article briefly addresses what kinds of real organizational culture changes are desired and at least one path for organizations to identify and implement changes (doing a CVF analysis of their one institution). Some of the interviewees suggested changes that would value innovation from the top, move away from consensus-based decision-making when it was unwieldy, openness to staff suggestions, and thoughtful risk-taking. Such changes do not require however that organizations become chaotic or followers of fads. At the same time, interviewees did not want to completely throw out the collaborative, clan-like structure of libraries. Finding a balance between these seems to me to strike the middle ground between messy, de-stabilizing innovation and stagnant dysfunction. Stable enough, yet innovative perhaps?

I’d have to say that by these rubrics especially, I work in a library that is pretty open to innovation. Maybe that’s the reason Digital Collections is allowed to kind of make an innovative “mess” sometimes. This post has been kind of rambling, but I think I’m going to be pondering the tension between messy innovation and stable dysfunctionality for quite a while…

Content, appearance, and functionality are all being addressed in the overhaul, which is planned to begin this summer and continue for the next year or so. Changes will be prioritized based on feedback from users. We’re hoping to spread the word about the survey, and so I am posting about it here (although it may be slightly off topic) in hopes that readers will (1) take the survey and (2) share the survey with others, especially K12 and undergraduate educators and students. By filling out the brief online survey about interests or information needs as they relate to North Carolina, we hope it will help to improve the eNCyclopedia.

Separate surveys have been developed for adults and for students.

• The main survey, for researchers, librarians, educators and other adults may be found online at http://tinyurl.com/ncency.
• The survey for students is available at http://tinyurl.com/ncstudent.

The surveys will be open through Sunday, June 21, 2009. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Michelle Czaikowski at the State Library (Michelle.Czaikowski@ncdcr.gov).

The results were interesting. First my user base was different than what I think I’ve gotten in other types of feedback (more undergraduates, more diverse range of disciplines studied), but also more controlled (the type of undergraduate interested in playing video games and getting free pizza!). During the course of the night I got about 35 takers. While they didn’t seem to engage with the site in the same way they would in a more controlled setting, it was interesting to get their more casual, off-the-cuff responses. I found that we definitely need to rethink the way we are presenting the tagging/commenting feature, and it was sort of interesting to hear the various explanations of what they thought the purpose of digital collections was (a lot of responses included “images”, some thought the site was of things that were “no longer in the library”, others thought they were digitized versions of the art exhibits that are put up in the library on a regular basis).

All in all, I think I learned some good info, and I might try it again in the fall, but this time set up during the course of normal day in the lobby, near the coffee shop and see what happens.

At any rate, I thought this might be a good forum for sharing any interesting results of testing, in way to continue some of the conversation from Jill’s earlier post (although her’s of course explore more broadly the idea of evaluation).

* Once per semester the library opens late on a Friday, sets up a couple of video game stations with things like Guitar Hero, Mario Kart, etc. and supplies free pizza and drinks. It’s supposed to be a way to get more students into the library and create a sense of community…
**For the life of me, I can’t remember where I heard about this. Has anyone else heard of anything like this? I’d like to give credit where it is due

Merrilee Proffitt and Jennifer Schaffner wrote:

Although we need evidence of the impact of digitization and the unique collections themselves, quantitative metrics aren’t enough. We must make sure libraries and archives both measure use of special collections and work with faculty to demonstrate their value for excellent research.” (RLG Programs 2008: The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship [PDF], p. 7. )

How can we measure the “impact” of our digital collections? What uses are most important to us? What are the best methods for documenting them? Surveys? Case studies? Interviews? How would we know these uses were taking place, especially in the classroom? Could we use citation analysis somehow? Would citation analysis miss some innovative uses of our collections, like mashups or digital art?

What about evaluation of internal processes in digital collection-building? Do you keep track of the average time and cost to build a digital collection? Average time and cost per item? One interesting idea for documentation and evaluation of internal workflows is the Balanced Scorecard management tool in use at University of Virginia Libraries. Could we adapt a model like this for digitization initiatives?