Imagine Your Libraries Future

Imagine your libraries future: Scenario Planning for libraries and information organisations by Steve O’Connor and Peter Sidorko. Chandos, 2010. ISBN: 9781843346005. £45

It is fascinating and very welcome that this book has made its way to print in the UK. The authors are based in Hong Kong, both originally Australian and at the peak of their professional careers. O’Connor is a former CEO of the Australian CAVAL consortium and has been writing about and championing scenario planning for over a decade, while Sidorko has for a decade been Deputy Librarian at the University of Hong Kong and has recently used scenario planning to completely refocus and reposition a very large traditional research library with huge legacy collections. This gives a mix of the theoretical and the practical which gives the book great strength. It also means that the writing is refreshingly non Anglo-American, drawing particularly on Asian and Australasian examples and giving a timely reminder that India and China dominate web usage at least in numeric terms.

The title is part of the Chandos Information Professional Series. The series is aimed at busy professionals and commissioned to give an authoritative view of current thinking and aims to be both easy to read and practical. This can lead to a slightly uncertain tone at times, balancing awkwardly between undergraduate primer and professional discourse. For example, an excellent and in places exhilarating environment scan sweeping from GK Chesterton and McLuhan to Berners-Lee leads to chapters which feel the need to explain what a paradox is or what the Google Books project is. There is, however, a good, clear structure. Scenario planning is first explained, followed by a substantial environment scan then a chapter on how library models are changing. Several chapters then take the reader in detail through the scenario planning process and this is reinforced by chapters on dealing with the consequences of such planning and half a dozen case studies. Scattered through the book are some good exercises to be carried out by the reader. The book can appear very simply written at times, and some of the exercises may seem very basic, but the reader will soon find that this is deceptive. Quite complicated concepts and arguments are rendered manageable, and apparently odd exercises – for example on travel to work, actually force lateral thinking. The authors celebrate the importance of stories as a tool for imagining the institution. This is an important and often neglected tool in understanding how organisations see themselves. And if some of the explanatory footnotes seem redundant there is a certain glee in others such as on the impact of steroid abuse on baseball statistics And just one pedantic nit to be picked. On page 9 the authors state that “The impact of technology cannot be underestimated.” Yes it can and usually is – and that is precisely part of the problem they describe. Presumably they mean exactly the opposite – that the impact cannot be overestimated.

A final noteworthy feature is the list of further reading. Rather than dry professional literature the hugely eclectic list of fifty items ranges from Fukuyama to Shirky. These are all mind expanding big picture works about risk, futures, the internet, management and are to be wholly commended as an important part of the authors own thinking.

But overall this is a book to be recommended. It makes a proven tool readily accessible and offers insight and fresh thinking which is unsettling - exactly as it should be.