Transition and Change: Technical Services at the Center

Transition and Change: Technical Services at the Center There is no need to expect that with the application of knowledge and skill things should always turn out right. Instead there is a growing recognition that it is necessary and responsible to arrange all human and organization resources so that they are future-responsive, so that they act in the present out of a concern for the future. The task is to enlarge our awareness of what is happening and what might happen. This means becoming learners as persons and organizations. It means learning how to become learners and to be learners we become embracers of error.[1] Since I began considering change and the modeling of change and found this quote, I have taken a funny kind of comfort from this thought. It is also true, it seems to me, that you can be sincere and still be stupid. Both of these thoughts may offer succor often as we continue to face the challenges of beginning to provide today the services that will be needed by the research library users of tomorrow. It is not simply that we divine the needs of tomorrow, but we are faced also with shaping new programs within today's constraints. We know from experience and fact-finding that research libraries have been and are today incredibly labor-intensive. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, we have determined that for every dollar we spend on a book or some other item of information, we must spend at least another dollar on making that information accessible--a dollar for staff, for equipment, for processing, and so forth. We know that information without accessibility is information made useless. Yet, we overcome such limitations, for we are seeing ever more clearly that technology and computerization are affecting our society and our libraries. We see this impact in changing scholarly communication patterns, in the increasing availability of electronic information, and in new kinds of formal and informal networking. Taken together, these various changes combine to make a critical mass that is producing a new paradigm. Just what is a paradigm? In the sense it is used here it is a framework of thought, a scheme for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality. Paradigms shift when a distinctly new way of thinking about old problems is developed. The King in a New Yorker cartoon announces that he can so repair Humpty Dumpty--but he needs more horses and more men. In just that irrational mode we try to solve problems with our existing tools, in their old context. The new thing on our horizon is electronic information. It requires of us a new paradigm not because it is new but because it has some essential characteristics with which we deal that differ from anything we have dealt with up to this point. What we are seeing is not isolated change, but changes in almost every environment--changes in how we view humankind, changes in our view of management, changes affecting our knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values. Clearly, we see that change is part of an interlocking complex of variables. It is most often the case, however, that change occurs when there is a confluence of both change in values and economic necessity--not before. In the past five years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library System has experienced both economic necessity and a reexamination of values. THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON When I arrived at the UW-Madison in 1984, the General Library System had been working along on a number of problems and concerns which had culminated in a faculty committee report and a chancellor's consultant study. To be resolved were issues related to the implementation of the Network Library System (NLS), and an online computerized library system which had been under development and did not seem operational, the need for space and shelving in the main Memorial Library, the implementation of a bimodal career track for librarians, the need for a new and more effective organizational arrangement, and a series of budget cuts. …