Chris Anderson has noticed that risk aversion and a lack of imagination are making CIOs irrelevant:

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying “No”, not “What if…” And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered “We don’t stock it anymore. It kept selling out.”

Later on he notes that this is the biggest problem at universities:

The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

From what I know, universities didn’t create CIOs until recently, and they don’t really have much function. Most departments manage there own IT. In the liberal arts, this just means faculty and administrator desktops, but in the hard sciences it usually involves research equipment that goes over the central service’s head. Yes, there are certain shared services that the university needs - most importantly single sign-on, but I’d argue mail and file storage as well - but then get out of the way. With the price of storage as low as it is, I can’t imagine why universities have such low quotas, which is one of the things that drives engineering and art colleges to run their own parallel systems. If your job is keeping the lights on, that’s where you need to innovate - give people the tools they need to do what they want to do better, don’t blow money on tools that other people do better, cheaper.

And, as in all cases, if you’re having discussions about whether or not you’re relevant anymore, it means you’re already irrelevant. It’s time to either reinvent what you do, or stop wasting resources.

Categories: Business and Economics, Governance, Information Economics, Libraries, The Academy
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In the WaPo, a librarian laments that books are a hard sell, and futility tries to save them:

But as I moved along in my library science program, I found that books weren’t really our focus. Information management, database networking and research tools claimed the largest share of the curriculum. In other words, literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about libraries, information searches are usually for more specific information than a book offers.  Finding that specific information is tough, and a book surrounds it with hundreds of pages of noise that are difficult to search through.  Successful librarians, or information specialists, are the ones who are recognizing this and adapting.  They see their profession holistically.  Unfortunately, too many nostalgic Luddites are still wandering around library science programs trying to prolong and accentuate their love affair with the physical book.

Categories: Books, Education, Information Economics, Libraries, Marketing
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The Washington Post notes that the Fairfax libraries are purging their collections to save on space:

So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes.

Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare’s plays, “The Great Gatsby” and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah’s Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

Later in the article,

To do more with less, Fairfax library officials have started running like businesses. Clay bought state-of-the art software that spits out data on each of the 3.1 million books in the county system — including age, number of times checked out and when. There are also statistics on the percentages of shelf space taken up by mysteries, biographies and kids’ books.

A few observations of my own:

1. It’s about time libraries started running themselves like a business. In many ways, they’re actually (sadly) one of the first government agencies to do so. Libraries face direct competition on a number of fronts, from coffee houses, book stores, the internet, and other cultural institutions. They need to adapt to stay relevant, and in doing so, they need to adopt the management practices that have made their competitors so effective. On the flipside, libraries also need to get over themselves and realize that, with all this competition, they can’t continue to see themselves the same way they did fifteen or twenty years ago.
2. The computer system only uses circulation data, but the best use I get out of a library is when I go there for breadth, rather than depth, and don’t check books out. Instead, I’ll pull a number of relevant books off the shelf and read a chapter or so of each, often because it’s all I need or all that’s relevant. I use the library as a reference service, not a lending service (in part because I’m not capable of returning anything on time). A more accurate measure of reference use would be how often a book is reshelved, and even that metric is flawed - was the book reshelved because people found it useful but didn’t need to check it out, or because they took it off the shelf and then weren’t interested? Gathering the metric with the computer system wouldn’t be difficult - add a reshelf table to the database, and before books are reshelved, scan the whole cart. I also imagine this would work better for non-fiction than fiction.
3. As the article points out, libraries aren’t nearly as much about books anymore. Fiction is exceptionally cheap relative to incomes, to the point where owning books is much easier and much more common. Books also take a long time to bring to market, so for many subjects, they can’t stay timely and accurate very long. I remember going to the library when I was little and finding two decade old current events books, or books about computers from the 60’s. At some point, these just take up space. Most of my friends who consistently use the library see it as a cheaper form of Blockbuster (but with harsher late fees). Others use it as a meeting place. The only people I know who depend on it for books are my grandparents, and even they’re starting to buy more.

Categories: Books, Business and Economics, Community, Distribution, Governance, Information Economics, Libraries, Metrics, Strategy
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