Kenning Arlitsch (University of Utah) Kristin Antelman (North Carolina State University)

• Conducted a survey of 240 future leaders with a 72% response rate
• Their questions: Are future leaders satisfied with org style? How impact effectiveness?
• Maloney, Antelman, Arlitsch, Butler. “Future Leaders’ Views on Organizational Culture.” College and Research Libraries, May 2010.
  Preprint: http://bit.ly/futureleaders
• What they learned:
• Librarians prefer more flexible and externally focused culture.
• Looked at competing values framework
• Participants distributed points among questions representing this framework.
• Showed image of what people prefer and what they currently believe to be the case. Very different.
• Librarians feel thwarted by current organizational cultures.
• Some might leave, make less of a contribution than their potential might indicate.
• 31% say a lot, 50% say somewhat, 19% say not at all thwarted by organizational culture.
• Those who say not at all mostly in adhocracy environment, those who say a lot are in hierarchy cultures.
• Looked at concerns…(conducted 20 video interviews. used open ended questions)
• Over develop processes
• Don’t deal on a scale basis, focus on niches
• Don’t always value risk taking
• Lack of technical proficiency among librarians
• Continued to focus on low value functions
• Too much of a consensus culture
• What should we do more of?
  • “The web… will never decrease in importance, and we’ve never staffed ourselves for success here.”
  • “1)Leverage the massive amounts of data that we have available and build innovative services that reveal research collections to patrons 2) hire technologists”… to make them available
  • Academic libraries not providing best access. Very good at one-on-one face-to-face, but we’re losing other patrons.
  • Users tell us and demonstrate to use  they use tech, but we don’t staff for this.
• What should we do less of?
  • Our confounding systems and then instruction to unconfound them. Put half the instruction energy into design, and we wouldn’t have to instruct as much.
  • “Traditional reference services need to end.”
  • “AACR2-MARC-OCLC Cataloging”
  • Move staff from traditional to eresources. Make print the specialty and eresources the locus of most of our energy.
• We are a deeply conservative professions and have been slow to react to new technological service demands of users.
• We don’t employ technologies intelligently, and we fail to develop technically-proficient professionals.
• We don’t invest enough in areas of future growth, and we continue to invest in low-value functions.
• The organizational culture and management style that IT staff find productive is the same type of organization all librarians want to work in.
• Traditional hierarchies and management styles thwart younger librarians’ efforts to make an impact. They might leave the field (esp. IT and instructional technologists) though MLS might keep them tied to the field a little bit longer.
• Strong reaction (at some presentations) against these results. First step: to admit there might be a problem.
• Comment from the audience on how in many libraries, library IT push forward, library staff maintain, and campus IT is the most conservative (re: change). Discussion about is it security among IT? That library staff is more service focused?
• Someone pointed out this conversation has been happening for the past 30 years. Presenter pointed out that 30 years ago patrons still had to come to us. Today they don’t.
• Question about IT skills and libraries. Do we really need MLS degreed IT people? DO we really need to teach IT skills in library school? Small level stuff, it’s good to have one person who can take it from concept to prototype. Bigger projects need more IT skills.
• Lots of comments on lack of project management in libraries and library school.
• Question asking if people who feel thwarted don’t have consensus building skills. They asked everyone if they did things like: blog, present, write, get grants, serve on committees, etc. Most did about 6/8. Presenter says this suggests they’re good at consensus building, but still feel thwarted at work.
• Need a radical approach to continuing education. People don’t want to stand in the way of progress. What skills can people develop and how can we provide educational opportunities? Gap for mature professionals to get back in and not feel thwarted themselves by lack of available ways to update their skills.
• Some librarians waiting on a class from IT, but that’s not how you learn this type of information. You learn it by diving in and trying things out or buying a book if you need to.