LITA Forum: Are We Starting to Get IT?

October 5, 2009

If I learned one thing at LITA Forum this year, it's that if you put a bunch of techie librarians together in one hotel for a whole weekend, they're going to spend a lot of time dishing on IT. No single session encompassed the overarching theme of the casual break-time conversations better than Kenning Arlitsch (University of Utah) and Kristen Antelman's (North Carolina State University) talk, "The Future of Libraries is IT (and some people just don't get IT)." In their talk, they presented findings from research they conducted on future leaders' perceptions of organization in libraries. The report, Future Leaders' Views of Organizational Culture, shows that "future leaders of academic libraries perceive a significant gap between their current and preferred organizational cultures, and that current organizational cultures limit their effectiveness." The researchers interviewed 240 future leaders in libraries and got a 72% response rate. Results showed that overall, these librarians prefer more flexible and externally focused culture, feeling thwarted by their current organizations and tending to prefer adhocracy overwhelmingly. Compelling visuals from the study's findings showed that the more people felt their organization's IT department was hierarchic, the more they preferred adhocracy. Study participants clearly showed discontent toward hierarchic organizations' overdeveloped processes, not valuing risk taking, lack of technical proficiency, and "newly minted" librarians who have more technical proficiency than those who have been in the profession for a long time. As a deeply conservative profession, according to the presenters, librarians have been slow to react to technological change. They further concluded that we don't employ technologies intelligently, we fail to develop technically proficient professionals, we don't invest enough in areas of future growth while continuing to invest in low-value functions (such as print-based processes that don't translate well into an electronic environment), and traditional organizational hierarchies and management styles thwart younger librarians' efforts to make an impact (a few audience members were quick to point out that it's not just the younger librarians who feel thwarted). The presenters didn't have a quick solution to fix all our organizational cultures. At least the packed room of LITA attendees understood the problem; the presenters told the crowd that they get a strong reaction from some crowds when they present their findings. "The first step is to admit you have a problem," they said.

RELATED POSTS: