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    Facelifts for Special Libraries: A Practical Guide to Revitalizing Diverse Physical and Digital Spaces
    Facelifts for Special Libraries: A Practical Guide to Revitalizing Diverse Physical and Digital Spaces
    Facelifts for Special Libraries: A Practical Guide to Revitalizing Diverse Physical and Digital Spaces
    Ebook209 pages2 hours

    Facelifts for Special Libraries: A Practical Guide to Revitalizing Diverse Physical and Digital Spaces

    By Dawn Bassett, Jenny Fry and Brooke Ballantyne-Scott

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    About this ebook

    Libraries/information centres are continuously evolving to keep up with rapid changes in information gathering, processing, and distribution. Corporate and non-profit special libraries face special challenges in revitalizing their physical space and providing efficient access to digital content. This book provides solo-librarians or special library managers with practical advice as to revitalize their libraries both in the physical space and the digital space. The book uses case studies, surveys and literature review to provide practical, innovative and evidence-based information to help special librarians develop information centres that will remain relevant to their organizations.
    • Written from an evidence-based perspective
    • Each section includes case studies, interviews or examples from libraries and librarians
    • Written specifically for special librarians
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElsevier Science
    Release dateSep 9, 2010
    ISBN9781780630427
    Facelifts for Special Libraries: A Practical Guide to Revitalizing Diverse Physical and Digital Spaces
    Author

    Dawn Bassett

    Dawn Bassett, BA, MLIS, earned her Masters of Library and Information Studies from the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and has worked mainly as a professional corporate librarian in both for profit and not-for-profit special libraries - but has also worked in academic libraries and as an independent researcher.

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      Book preview

      Facelifts for Special Libraries - Dawn Bassett

      dbassett69@gmail.com

      Preface

      Why revitalise?

      A good question and one every librarian, information centre manager or library manager will inevitably ask themselves. Beyond getting rid of that outdated furniture from the 1970s, replacing an unsteady shelving unit or repairing broken links on a website, revitalisation offers us an opportunity to explore and improve our physical and digital environments from the perspective of our users.

      There are many different types of libraries and information centres, managed by just as many different individuals attempting to meet the diverse information needs of millions of users every day. The challenge is how to meet these needs with increasingly limited staff and financial resources. Although it might be tempting, particularly during tough economic times, to just keep the status quo, authors such as Kathryn J. Deiss argue that

      Creating services that add value for the customer takes precedence over all other drivers in determining organizational success in the twenty-first century. Libraries uniquely capable of anticipating and meeting customer needs in ways that mirror a changing world are the libraries that are deemed successful and, therefore, are able to attract resources and talent. It is evident from current environmental indicators that organizations need to utilize two tools skillfully in order to create customer value: innovation and strategy. (Deiss 2004, 17–32)

      Deiss notes that innovation occurs when new or fresh ideas (i.e. creativity) result in a product or service. Although Deiss’s paper focuses on organisational development, this principle is also in action throughout many libraries at an individual level. In fact, some argue that innovation and strategy often flourish when we face financial constraints. In the economy we are currently experiencing, everyone must be creative in both our personal and our professional lives. Librarians are particularly well suited to this challenge. We demonstrate this flexibility in our everyday practice, as we find answers to difficult questions, help diverse user groups, manage our time and budgets, and certainly as we develop the physical and digital spaces we occupy. But as much as each librarian may have a particular aesthetic preference, our spaces must effectively serve our staff, supervisors, parent organisations and most importantly our primary user groups: the people who occupy our spaces and use our services. Novel services, processes and products are also part of the library as place, whether in the physical space like a building, a room or an office, or digital space like a website, catalogue or blog. The way we present both ourselves and our space to our users – the colours we use, the lighting, the type of furniture they sit on, the home page of our website – all these things tell the user something about where they are. Clearly, if we can create comfortable spaces that make our users want to come back regularly, we are making progress.

      One of the best ways to determine whether our physical and digital spaces are meeting the needs and expectations of our users is to find time to evaluate them with fresh eyes. Approach the study areas, shelving, circulation desk, website and catalogue from the perspective of someone who has never used that space. What do users want to find in your physical and digital spaces? What will make them stay and what will make them come back? What will make them tell other people that this is where they need to come to access information?

      Who are you?

      You are a solo librarian or manager of a small special library, resource centre or information centre. Your organisation may be a corporate, non-profit, government, health services, legal services, research or industrial entity. You are reading this book, so there’s a good chance you have either had an experience with a revitalisation or renovation, or you are about to embark upon a project of this description. For that, we applaud you. Whether your project is large or small, you’re doing something above and beyond your daily duties to improve your library space for your users.

      Who are we?

      We are three librarians who have managed recent revitalisation and renovation projects in small special libraries. This is the book that we wish we’d had when we were embarking on our own renovations. In our research for this book, we discovered many quality resources for designing and renovating libraries. The majority of these focused on academic or public libraries and many were geared toward building libraries from the ground up. There were fewer resources that discussed the challenges of renovating smaller special libraries and these were usually focused on a particular type of collection or a specific research project. Library schools that offer courses in planning and design for libraries usually focus on large libraries with medium to large capital budgets. What we were looking for was a resource that would give us tips and practical examples of what we could do to revitalise an existing special library. We hope that this book will provide this resource for you. Once we had reviewed the literature, we sent out a request for stories from special libraries about their revitalisation projects and included examples from a survey on special library renovations that we conducted in 2007. These stories and case studies are scattered throughout the chapters of this book as Helpful hints. We also wanted to explore simple ways we could revitalise our spaces while still considering our carbon footprint and included them as Green tips. Finally, we have included a resource list at the end of each section. In developing our For further reading lists we made a conscious decision not to include internet links which would too quickly become broken, and instead have offered key organisations, journals, books and search terms to get you started whether you are reading this book in 2010 or several years from

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