Selecting and Implementing Technologies in Libraries by Tod Colegrove

Author:Tod Colegrove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

BUDGETING AND TECHNOLOGY

There is precious little room for exploring the selection and potential implementation of new technology in the library if our institutional soul is devoted only to the care and feeding of past selections of technology, regardless of how central they might be to current practice. Instead of an almost exclusive focus on the resources we provide—for example, books or databases—shifting our story to one of providing access can be a game changer.6 Seen through that lens, it is absolutely appropriate to use “collections” monies for the purchase of technology. It is what libraries do: we provide shared access to information/technology in our communities. It just happens that for much of the past couple hundred years, the form of that technology has been the print book. Over the past fifty years, ever-increasing rates of change in technology have driven an increasing need for change in our libraries.

From a budgeting standpoint, changing technology presents a type of chicken-or-egg problem.7 Budgets typically reflect what the library has done in the past and are inflexible and unforgiving of change unless they are specifically designed to accommodate it. With a foundation firmly set by how the library has spent its funds in the past, there is typically no ready-made line item to enable the library to adopt a technology or practice intrinsically new to the library’s practice. That’s where we come in as library practitioners: it is our job to make sure the budget reflects the priorities of the organization. It is our responsibility to design it to accommodate where we see libraries moving. It is one thing to budget for replacing a failing photocopy machine, and quite another to anticipate and enable the first time a library ever acquired the technological wonder—one can only imagine how the very first library to acquire a copier wrestled with the idea and justified the expense. And yet it is exactly that sort of task that libraries are asked to do today on an almost ongoing basis.

With a renewed sense of purpose, there are three ways to look at technology and budgeting within the organization:8

as a driver and a necessity

as a cost center

as an equal to other departments

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