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December 14, 2008
Sustainable Technology in a 2.0 World
This past week I presented the keynote address at the Arizona Library Association's annual conference in Glendale. The subject was how to keep all of these lovely 2.0 projects running, plan them well, and evaluate them. Perhaps some of you will find the presentation helpful to the project planning and evaluation processes in your own libraries. Please feel free to use it if it helps!
Sustainable Technology in a 2.0 World (2.4MB PDF) by Sarah Houghton-Jan
December 14, 2008 | Permalink
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Hi Sarah,
Good information! I recently (as in this morning) posted my first major project working at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas: a redesign of our catalog!
http://webpac.library.unlv.edu/search~S1
Your advice is pretty much dead on, and I would like to make two additions: strictly define the scope of a project and be tenacious! At a large organization dealing with a large upgrade, there are bound to be almost limitless opinions, concerns, and speed bumps. Problems will arise from every angle.
I had initially wanted to a do an even more aggressive redesign, including the Google Books full text previews, user comments and ratings, libraryThing tags, write our own faceted search, etc. However, when we took our ideas to the committee, they quickly became overwhelmed, and gave us a much larger number of roadblocks to conquer. After some initial meetings, we reduced the scope of our project dramatically: update only the design. This allowed us to focus our efforts, and comments and concerns outside of that scope were noted for future updates, but not addressed specifically. Simply focusing our scope removed a number of organizational roadblocks.
Furthermore, I'm a young designer fresh out of school and I have never worked in an organization this large. Nor have I had my projects approved by so many rounds of vetting. I got hammered by complaints and grievances, and have gotten virtually no positive feedback from within the institution. Furthermore, many people distrusted our department because of former employees. What I'm saying is that it can be extremely difficult and disheartening to push big projects through, and if you're going to do it, you have to fully commit to your project and simply not allow anyone or anything to dissuade you. You need to harness the tenacity and resolve inside and fight through the boundless layers of bureaucracy and BS you'll likely encounter.
Hope those are helpful additions!
- Brian
Posted by: Brian | December15, 2008
