On Tuesday, I got the opportunity to hear Betsy Wilson talk about the library's future. Or more specifically, the path that her Library at the University of Washington is on, and some of the factors that she sees as going into creating the library of the future.

While she touched on many worth while issues, some of the previous posters have done a better job than I could of encapsulating her entire presentation.

So, I will look at the 2 things that she mentioned which really intrigued me. Namely;

• The Culture of Assessment
• We must look to our past to see our future

 First off I will tackle the "Culture of Assessment".

Besty pointed out that we, as members of a library community, have many cultres, the Culture of the book, the culture of control,  the culture of quiet etc. And that the culture we need to adopt is a culture of assessment.

Her basic argument here was that  we need to be able to assess what our patrons and users need in order to be able to adapt to the future. While we are good at talking with our current faculty and listening to their needs, Betsy made an argument that we may be behind when assessing the needs of our incoming students and faculty. 

She pointed out that while use statsistics at libraries and reference desks are going down, the numbers of patrons are generally going up. She also showed us some snippets from a comprhensive look at the needs of Bioscientists, and what they told us about the library. However, the bottom line in my opinion was the overall concept that we are not assessing our changing environment, or anticipating the future as effectively as we need to in order to respond and anticipate the needs of the future.

But how do we create a culture of assessment? Well, thats something we will need to determine for ourselves.

Looking into the past to determine the future. 

The other thing that she touched on that fascinated me was the idea that we need to look to our past to determine our future. While this wasnt a big part of her talk, it was the starting premise. She started by talking about the man at UW who had a vision to create a giant library and was eventually fired for it, but that vision was key to creating a 20th century library at UW.

Now that we are trying to creat a 21st century library, perhaps our past can tell us some things. So, while this next line of thought was inspired by Betsy Wilson, I am going off the map from her talk a bit.

In the past, Libraries were very focused on control. Librarians dictated what books were worthy to be in a library, and many chose to just have "quality" books. In early librarianship, there was a concept of "they will come to us" that was very pervasive.

As we know, that focus on control in collections has changed somewhat, and while librarians still need to make decisions about quality, there is also a good deal of buying what the populace wants. Thus, we have "Harry Potter" and Tolkien in our libraries along with the most recent Science journals. So, in collections, a more patron/user oriented focus developed over time.

Along with this change in focus for collections, we have changed our focus on access. There was a time where many of our library buildings were designed to have the stacks only be accessible only to  Librarians and Staff. Patrons had to request the items they wanted and we would page them. While this was great for collection security and maintenance, it meant that our collections were more isolated from our users. Browsing was impossible, and patrons had to know what they wanted in order to get it...I can only imagine starting research on ones own was impossible! Eventually, we opened a majority of our stacks, and gave the patrons more control over their own search.

The exact same can be said for computer searching. At one time (in part due to expense)  Librarians guided all patrons on their searches. Over time, technology, and a focus by the computer industry on user interfaces created an environment where we are no longer involved in every search. In fact, patrons are more in control of their own research than ever before, and able to answer many of the questions that we used to help them with.

So, what does this brief look at the past tell us? In short, it tells me that we have been on a course of adapting to the needs of our users since the very beginning. As hard as each change has been, we have had to adapt to the needs of our patrons.

In the end, the reason I am writing about these two things together is this...it is inevitable that we will adjust to the needs of our patrons. We will adjust, or we will perish as an institution on this campus. However, we can either adjust after the fact, or with a working culture of assessment, we can change with, or perhaps even anticipate change, and remain a viable, cutting edge institution.

With all of this in mind, I will leave you with one more comment that Betsy made that really struck me. She stated that at UW they are already looking at ways to do away with an Integrated Library System. Considering that we are just making the real push to get one, I couldnt help but worry about what this may mean...are we that far behind? Is UW that far ahead? Im not sure what the answer is, but as long as we are making changes, we should be sure to move ahead of the curve, and not just play catch up.