I just wrote briefly about the struggle to invite and promote innovation within the confines of a 40 hour, a whole lot to do already, kind of professional world. Kinda vague, so here – let me flesh it out with an example.
As manager of our IT department I know very well what my “local” environment is like. I know that while my department supports our library systems’ desktops – hardware and applications – we don’t support, or control some other pivotal areas – like network or overall enterprise security (intrusion detection devices, packet sniffing, etc. etc.) As one department of a larger county government, I vacillate between being happy about this (hooray – thank goodness I don’t have to monitor the latest rouge spyware) and being constrained by this (sigh-don’t make me “defend” the library’s bandwidth use, sometimes labeled excessive by others, again).
But there it is – that’s my world. A constant dialog; a give and take. This makes the wonderfully serendipitous nature of discovery, learning, and play online a tricky path to skip along sometimes.
I’m curious to hear from other libraries – those that are part of a larger organization and those that are relatively “independent” – about how you maintain the balance of advocating for “free and open” discovery for your libraryland while at the same time being held accountable for the traffic, online vulnerabilities, and overall IT resource allocation of your libraryland.
The Leapin' Librarian 