Recommendation on innovation

Cultivate an ethos of innovation

Small-scale, independent research and development, by innovators at  
individual library organizations, is particularly important, yet  
innovators at small organizations may be isolated, with only limited  
opportunities for contact with their counterparts elsewhere. This  
limits the sharing and reuse of innovations across the community. Thus  
there may be great duplication of effort (especially in small  
libraries) towards rediscovering solutions to common, shared problems,  
rather than advancing the state of the art. Communication of ideas and  
loose-knit collaboration across the community can save time and  
achieve common goals. Existing ad hoc communities such as Code4Lib,  
dev8D, and the mashedUp series provide support, networking, and  
information sharing for innovators. Developers and other innovators in  
these communities need to be further engaged and supported to grow  
libraries' capacity for problem-solving and innovation.

Research and development is also advanced at library and  
information-focused graduate schools, especially the i-schools,  
through research-oriented organizations like ASIS&T and the Dublin  
Core Metadata Initiative, and in independent research groups like OCLC  
Research. Connections between such research organizations and  
individual libraries (especially small libraries, public libraries,  
and special libraries) could also be fruitful, both in translating  
research advances more quickly into production-level implementations  
and in directing research attention to new problems.



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Wednesday, 4 May 2011 12:49:00 UTC