Today – partly sunny and breezy

Citation

Boese, K.C. (2005), "Today – partly sunny and breezy", The Bottom Line, Vol. 18 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2005.17018aaa.001

Today – partly sunny and breezy

For any business to have a financially successful future, data is collected and analyzed, trends are identified and acted upon, and an attempt is made to foresee what is likely to come in the future. This is forecasting, and it seems to me – based on my observations – that librarians don’t do enough of it. True, some of the activities we do touch upon aspects of forecasting, but in general, we tend to be a profession that reacts to situations, rather than anticipating them.

This, in no small part, may be due to us viewing ourselves as a profession, rather than as professionals working in an industry … and it is easy to see why we have this attitude. After all, we:

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  don’t operate with a goal to make a profit;

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  don’t generally charge for physical goods or services;

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  rarely see ourselves as possessing anything in our collections of monetary value that we could sell; and

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  view ourselves as a public good that should be supported, not as a valuable commodity that is essential to support.

Well, times have changed and will continue to do so. Perhaps the single most important change that we should embrace is that libraries are a business. We need to operate with an awareness towards profits and losses, discontinue services that have little or no return from our investment (money, staff, resources, and time), and embrace new initiatives that are needed by our users and profitable.

Of course, profits can be measured monetarily. They can also be measured in other ways. Providing users with the services important to them – not the services we think they should have – can profit us with good will and strong community support, an essential when an initiative is on the ballot seeking capital for our next library building project.

We also need to realize that we do have goods and services that we can, and should, sell. While we should always provide free access to the intellectual content in our care, I have a hard time understanding why many of us operate services, such as inter-library loan, on a not-for-profit model. There should absolutely be profit in this service, and others, above the mere cost of the transaction.

The goods we own vary widely from library to library, but the chief resource that comes to mind is images. Many libraries own collections of postcards, photographs, artwork, and ephemera to name but a few. These collections are both interesting and graphic in nature. Often times, they contain scarce and unique materials. I believe untapped profits exist in many of these collections because we can sell permission to reproduce our images as well as request complimentary copies of any publication that includes reproductions of them. That said, we have to rise to the challenge of making these images known and desired. No one will request an image unless they know it exists. We need to find ways (digital, print, etc.) to make our most desirable images accessible and marketable.

And all this brings me back to forecasting. Before we begin new initiatives and services, or discontinue old ones, we need a keen understanding of what we have of value, what our current users rely on us for, and why others are not using us at all. We should be up-to-date not only on professional developments, but also on current events, the arts, and science news. By absorbing the news around us, and filtering it through the question “Does this impact my library?”, we are better able to forecast what the future will demand and expect of our institutions, and be prepared to meet that day.

To that end, two of the columns in this journal have changed. The “Internet” column is now “Bits & Bytes”, and will broaden its scope to include anything of an electronic nature. This is especially timely as the lines between digital, physical, and web-based information continues to blur.

“If you want my 2¢ worth” will be replaced in this issue with a new column, “Between the lines”. This feature will attempt to illustrate how recent news items which are seemingly unrelated to libraries actually may have an impact on what we do or how we do it. In one sense, this column began in this editorial in the last issue – where I commented on a commercial film’s use of image collections and stock film footage, and suggested how this practice could impact library services.

By approaching our operations more from a business model than from a services model, we can make better use of the many studies we undertake each year to determine our corporate health. We can also focus our attention on where we are and should be going, rather than on where we were and what we might be giving up. Being reminded that “we didn’t do it that way ten years ago” in a planning meeting is not a proactive approach. It is also a mindset that may prevent us from forecasting those sunny days ahead.

Kent C. Boese