Cultural Research

Clyde, Where Are Your Library Innovation Posts?

I haven't been asked the headline question yet but I wanted to take a moment and clarify what I'm doing with this blog and how it relates to library innovation.

Two things are currently happening:

1) I'm writing my way into the topic which is how I typically work when blogging. If I was doing academic writing, my focus in public papers would be much clearer because a lot of this process would not be visible. But since I'm a blogger, you, dear reader, get a look at my process whether you want to or not!

2) Library innovation does not occur in a vacuum. I'm ultimately most interested in library innovation in higher education but that focus means that not only do I need to take into consideration the many factors affecting higher education as a whole, since a library serves a whole institutation, but also such areas as public and school libraries, because students come to college having already experienced such settings.

So I will bring up issues that may not seem to directly connect to higher ed but are actually quite influential in establishing the context for academic library usage [or non-usage, as the case might be].

That means that I'll also be discussing what I've learned on the open web over the last nine years during which much of my time has been spent as an online traveler and web publisher. I'll also be referring to my many years working in bookstores, where I learned much about customer service and about human navigation of information resources.

I would like to be able to say that whatever I blog about will therefore be connected to library innovation but that's a bit too easy. So I will do my best to at least make brief references regarding the relationship between a particular post and the topic of innovation, if that connection does not seem obvious, while occassionally allowing myself the blogger's perogative to go off-topic.

If you have any special interests related to library innovation that you would like me to dig into it, please let me know in the comments or at:
clydesmith(at)culturalresearch(dot)org

On that note, if you have any large files, commercial email, promo material or a newsletter you're hoping to sign me up for without permission, please uset:
culres(at)gmail(dot)com

It's the smart thing to do!

John Hagel on Knowledge: From Stocks to Flows

Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows - A Conversation with John Hagel

Joshua-Michéle Ross speaks with John Hagel, Co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge:

"One of the key principles that we have around this notion of a Big Shift in the aggregate is that increasingly we're moving from a world in business where the source of economic value is less and less around stocks of knowledge, what we know at any point in time, and it's shifting much more to the notion of participating effectively in flows of knowledge."

This is the kind of thinking on which I draw from the business world to consider questions related to how libraries might change in the years ahead. In many respects, academic libaries both archive stocks of knowledge and gather flows of knowledge.

But a shift from stocks of knowledge to flows might also suggest a move from traditional guide roles, such as pointing researchers to sources of data, to more active creator roles, such as creating mashups of data as new information sources.