Leading the Library Automation Project

Lynda Moulton, President

Library automation succeeds through the work performed by hardware, software, and people. Without the right human skills, no matter how advanced the technological tools, library automation will yield disappointing results. I have seen it happen many times. Alternatively, library automation systems may be extended to myriad applications, including a tool to support very sophisticated knowledge management projects, with the right people implementing and establishing goals and procedures. This can be accomplished even with severe limitations in the software or hardware resources.

Some remarkable results have been accomplished with very primitive software, all because of the skills of knowledgeable, confident, and practical professionals. Confidence comes from having the right mix of skill, know-how, and expertise. A confident professional is open and sharing and seeks cooperation and coordination. The latter are largely personal skills that depend on personality traits.

Lately, I have noticed a particular irony when it comes to librarians and automation. The essence of any type of knowledge management is sharing, peer-to-peer or through a formal information resource management process of coordinating knowledge. Librarians are often frustrated with the failure of potential users to seek them and their resources out. On the other hand, they are loath to promote and evangelize their services and resources. They tend to focus on tasks relating to physical management of collections instead of content management, which would more directly benefit the users. This is a generalization, but the scant availability of indexers and thesaurus developers illustrates the lack of interest in this area, especially among new librarians.

Given the challenge of working on a library automation initiative, I see two parallel opportunities for information professionals. One role is on the data processing and systems implementation side, working hand-in-hand with the IT group (people that control the hardware and networks). The other is on the content management side. Often, due to limited resources one person has to serve both roles.

Managing the Automation Project for your Organization; Tips for Planning and Implementation

The first imperative is to establish, why do it at all? It is going to be hard, require change, and require coordination among professionals, including other departments. One simple answer is that if you want to have a role in the information management, or knowledge management, arena of your organization you must perform all your work functions in accordance with business norms. Limiting your vision of how and what automation processes you can absorb or afford marginalizes the library severely and frequently results in total elimination. I, therefore have noted that often the people with extremely narrow views of what they want to automate, spend, and achieve are the ones whose jobs or libraries end up being eliminated. Limiting what you plan to automate versus totally integrating all library processes misses the principal reason to automate. Doing all your work to the full extent that automation supports is the accepted business norm in all organizations.

Can you accept the fact that if you want to follow normal business practices you must automate and it must be a complete solution to gain maximum efficiency? If so, you have to accept the difficulty, the change and the coordinating activities imposed by the automation process. The more accepting and open you are about the process, the more realistic and positive you can be in asserting your role; you will have conviction and the belief in the value of the outcome needed to embrace the challenge. If you can’t go in with this view, go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate why automation needs to be done at all.

Questions you might ask are basic but important:

What are the information needs of the organization?
Who will access the database?
What will the content be?
What is our computing environment or can it be changed?
Who will maintain the data?
Who will determine the process and procedural controls and standards?

Even though you may not find a vendor who has all automation tools you need, you should still strive to develop a plan to coordinate all components as seamlessly as possible during this investigative period.

Regardless of the scope of the project, these questions need not only answers, but also planning and human resources. If you initially only plan for a limited use of automation, for example serials check-in, with the idea of later creating a database of monographs for on-line retrieval, understand that you will have to repeat the planning phase. The second project will be complicated dramatically by the existence of the first system.

I find it hard to believe that these issues need to be discussed, but the hundreds of inquiries we have received about systems, even in recent years, indicates that many librarians still look for the cheapest and simplest projects to automate with no vision to scalability. It is one thing to implement a single function at a time; this we applaud. It is another thing entirely to buy limited stand-alone applications without end-user access to the data and then expect that you will have meaningful gains in efficiency with value for the organization.

The Human Face of the Project

By now you can see that I support formulating a vision of automation that assumes scalability is important. Planning for integration of processes and fit with the organization is equally important. The person who establishes the plan needs to have a vision that extends beyond the tasks of identifying and selecting a system. All organizations need someone on the library staff who grasps the full scope of the organization’s mission, operational resources, and constraints. This cannot be learned by staying within the library. This person must spend 50% of his or her time outside the department, building peer relationships with IT, management or any other department working with information resources.

The primary activity of the visionary is to discover what goals and resources the library currently, and potentially shares with the other groups. With the vision established, you can focus on the unique skills, expertise and resources the library has to offer. This is a good basis for building cooperation among the groups. A library, by any definition, exists to provide economy in sharing of information resources, traditionally books and journals. But the scope of resources is ever expanding, especially in special libraries. A person who works with other groups in planning for automation must look for needs that can be filled by his or her department. Take this planning phase as an opportunity to share expertise and educate other groups about the expertise you can offer. Information content management skills are lacking throughout all organizations. This is a library’s opportunity to assert its place in information content management. A person with special competency, personal and professional, should be assigned to this role.

Once the project for implementing an integrated automation solution is defined, accepted and moving forward, the visionary/coordinator often continues as the project manager. Additionally, with the right technical expertise, that person may also be given the responsibility of handling networking, hardware, and operating system issues.

Where does the expertise originate for the roles described? It comes from having a solid grounding in several areas that aren't necessarily part of a single degree program. The following types of courses are crucial for a database administrator: systems analysis, fundamentals of computing, database management systems (addresses the types, range, and tools that are available), organizational structures, cataloging and indexing theory, thesaurus development. Hands on experience doing reference/research work, plus indexing experience will give the person realistic understanding of the challenges of building a database of quality, and the tools needed to do it efficiently.

Where does one find courses or continuing education to acquire this expertise? Not many schools offer them all; many of the best have closed in past years. The teaching staff is not there to sustain a program that addresses this multi-disciplinary field. Visit schools of information and library science, computer science, and business and describe what you are seeking. We can only hope that if the requests come frequently enough, especially in this age of knowledge management, higher education will begin to respond.

Building the Database - The DBA (Data Base Administrator)

The human skills needed to perform this job well are hard to come by. The DBA controls and manages the content, playing a vital role in establishing the data entry standards and ensuring that they are enforced. It is an exacting professional discipline to labor over database content and those who are good at cataloging/indexing are usually tapped for this job. However, there is another important professional role that may be more difficult because it also requires a level of coordination with the end-user community. There must be vigilance about what content is important and for how long. In most organizations this is constantly in flux, more with some disciplines than others. When organizational imperatives are expanded, new content must be sought and included. When other initiatives are limited or canceled, material may be extracted. The DBA must be aware of content that is getting out-of-date and terminology in the structured indexes that is outmoded. New terminology must be added constantly to the controlled vocabulary lists, but thought must also be given to compressing the terms when too many synonyms or unused language creep in. The language of the system (or "taxonomies", as Internet search systems call them) plays a crucial role in the success and usefulness of a database. Arcane or user unfriendly index entries will result in frustrating the user, often to the point that the database will never be used again.

Level of use of the database is the only true measure of the importance of its existence. The bottom line is, if it not being used, it is not valued. If it isn’t valued, the people who build and defend it won’t last very long. Staying in tune with your audience is your primary function, whether you are the planner/implementer or the content manager/DBA. In the end, the technology is really a minor part of the cost and effort. The best people produce the biggest benefits and successes.

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