CIP on the Moon - comments

CIP on the moon -By John Celli — netConnect, 1/15/2008

I often blow through the Net Connect part of Library Journal. I am not alone in that. I am probably the only person at my library who pays any attention to it at all.  Too much Library 2.0 and other hooey. But Celli caught my attention. Not only does he quote the Boston Trustees, he also cites Michael Porter, another favorite of mine and a seminal source for my writing.

Here is why this article matters:

“Improving operational effectiveness is a necessary part of management,” Michael Porter notes in On Competition (Harvard Business Sch., 1998), “but it is not strategy.”

A company’s history, Porter suggests, can also help to revitalize its strategy. “What was the vision of the founder? What were the products and customers that made the company?” he reminds us to ask. In his History of Libraries in the Western World (Scarecrow Pr., 1984), Michael Harris identifies a passage in the 1852 Trustees Report of the Boston Public Library that articulates, “perhaps better than any document before or since, the ideal conception of public library service”:

As Porter says elsewhere, technology is not only not a strategy, it isn’t even a competitive advantage.

Now that I am bumping up against just copying the article, time for some comments.

It is great to improve operational effectiveness and that is the function of good management. Keeping the basis of your business/ operations in mind and using it to guide the operations is leadership and strategy. Librarians, being a passive/aggressive profession, make decent managers, but few aspire to leadership. We love to tweak libraries and make them better, but there is a serious resistance to looking under the hood and seeing just what it is we actually are doing for a living. Library history is made even more boring than is needs to be and it isn’t thrilling reading. But without it, we lose sight of why libraries exist. As this article suggests, it is not the containers (books), but the content. Celli may not have all the answers, but he is asking the right questions. Bravo!

Another recent article in a non-library source asked if libraries could be started today and what justification could they use in requesting public funding. The only answer is: the same rationale that was used the first time.  Public education for citizens is the only answer that has any traction. Not as a middle class entitlement, not as some legacy institution. Certainly not as a First Amendment institution.

I was heartened to see mission emphasized in several programs at the 2008 PLA. Too many programs focus on how rather than why. It is great to see how someone displays materials or designs cool spaces, but why are those spaces designed that way, why does display matter. Why do we talk so little about the contents of our libraries? No matter how much content a library has, how much on-line access it facilitates, how much it displays, if the content isn’t first rate, you are reduced to selling sizzle when you are charged with providing steak. Thus we can circle back to mission, serving the local community and making the world a better place. To do less is to be less than managers - just bureaucrats.