The sets of issues facing library leaders will always keep changing--but there's also worth in seeing what library leaders have found worth noting as issues.

This article combines three LLN peer panels and challenges from 2006, 2007 and 2008, offered chronologically. Which of these issues face you and your library today--and which hadn't you thought about recently?

The Biggest Issue (June 2008)

Edited by Frank Hermes.

Much is written in the library press about the many challenges we face today. Less is written about how to address these challenges, or at least less than makes sense to this reader. To deal with this situation, I asked our panel to consider the following questions:

• What is the one biggest issue facing libraries today?
• How does this issue affect you and your organization?
• How critical/threatening is this issue?
• What should be done to address this issue (by you and others)?

Loriene Roy

• What is the one biggest issue facing libraries today?

Dealing with change--in our patron demographics, rate of [assimilating] technological resources, workforce changes and finances.

• How does this issue affect you and your organization?

Personally: each of us has a greater need to stay informed, expand continuing education, seek and employ new avenues/methods of communication. Change impacts LIS programs. Student demographics have changed: younger students are entering programs. While they have strong academic skills, they may lack life experience. This makes student advising more important.

• How critical/threatening is this issue?

Response to change is critical to the survival of our profession and ourselves. Resistance may not mean elimination but certainly will affect the public's impression (and potential support) of libraries.

• What should be done to address this issue (by you and others)?

Adoption of technologies, discussion, interdisciplinarity, seeking out new partnerships and holding on to successful ones.

Gary Strong

I am always struck by this question, “What is the one thing that concerns you?” As I reflect just on this morning, I could answer that in several ways--and that is perhaps the most relevant answer.

Faced with resource reductions, commercial pressures, rebalancing, repurposing, rethinking, re-whatever, my head spins. The affect on the UCLA Library is daunting indeed. Many are asking, “What should the 21st Century Research Library be like?” I am ready to say, “Walk over and stand in the middle of it, we are in the 21st Century, and we will remain relevant to the academy.”

We have always believed in our mission to bring people and ideas together. When we can demonstrate and speak to how effectively we do that, we meet that challenge. It isn’t enough to say that “libraries change people’s lives.” We have to demonstrate it with very real life examples about “how.”

Over the past three years we have focused our annual progress reports first on undergraduate impact, then graduate student stories, and last year on how we have impacted the lives of selected faculty. People say to me that they get it; that the stories are relevant and meaningful. When there is that level of understanding by those who make funding and priority decisions, the library can benefit. Now we will see just how much!

Jamie LaRue

I just came back from an OCLC meeting (OCLC Members Council) and heard a preview of their latest report: "From Awareness to Funding." This one is going to make a big splash, and OCLC deserves major kudos for tackling it.

Its official release is about a month from now. But there are a couple of major themes that I think are powerful and important enough to talk about now. They're not surprises, but here's what is surprising: we don't use the things we know. This summary is not official, and is in my own words, mostly.

1. The greatest single predictor of library success at the ballot box (or by action of elected officials) is the public perception of the librarian. If the librarian is seen as a passionate advocate for lifelong learning, if the librarian is seen as knowledgeable about the world of learning and the community (my emphasis), this translates to actual fiscal support.
2. People do not respond to the message of the library as a source of "purposeful information." Homework assignments. The recipe for roast duck. Even a big consumer purchase. We have lots of competition for that role, and there's little that we can do to suddenly rise above Google in the popular mind as a source of reliable information. What people do respond to is the idea of the library as a transformative force: both personal transformation and the bringing together of community.

We all hit these messages at various times. But I don't think libraries--of all kinds--put these powerful and fundamental messages at the heart of their PR and marketing. We should.

Last year, my library lost a funding election. We're going back again this year. This information from OCLC could not be more timely or useful.

So there's my answer: the big challenge isn't knowing what to do, it's doing it. There is more than enough information out there to clearly indicate how to be a successful library. And guess what: It takes money. To get money, we have to learn how to gather and tell the stories that matter: about how those 500 storytimes Johnny went to jumped him past an early learning disorder and brought him to first grade ready to learn with the best of them. How the reference librarians helped Mrs. Jones write a business plan, get a loan, that let her leave behind a dreary, pointless career and start the business she dreamed of all her life. We need to learn to manifest the message that we are absolutely indispensable to the lives of our communities. Because we are.

Mike Crandall

I can't pass up an opportunity to comment on this one, since it directly relates to a major research study I'm working on with IMLS related to measuring the impact of public access computing in public libraries across the nation.

In January 2008, IMLS announced a major cooperative agreement with the University of Washington and the Urban Institute funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the impacts of public access computing offered by public libraries across the country. The purpose of the study is to examine the individual, family and community impacts of this core service provided by public libraries, from the perspective of public policy. As Jamie LaRue so eloquently points out in his summary of the OCLC study, it is this impact that is important in showing why libraries matter, and that will be so important in the future support and growth of library services.

The University of Washington is working closely with an expert committee drawn from agencies and organizations that work with policy decisions at the city, state and federal level, as well as leaders in the library community, to help collect information that can be used to effectively demonstrate impact, and that will be heard by policy makers when they make funding decisions and legislation affecting libraries. The UW will conduct a nationwide telephone and online survey over the coming months, and simultaneously visit 5 communities across the country to conduct in-depth interviews with library users, staff and administration, funding agency staff and other public access computing providers to determine what kinds of impact can be measured, how the results can be most effectively communicated, and what matters most to those policy makers when they are making decisions.

The impact measures being explored are tied directly to existing indicators used by national and international agencies to understand how programs in many areas affect the domains of 1.Employment Services, 2.E-commerce/Financial Services, 3.Education/Life-long Learning, 4.Social Inclusion, 5.Civic Engagement, 6.e-Government, and Health/Social Services. These domains have been identified as critical to the success of individuals, as well as their families and communities, and are commonly used to evaluate the value of services and agencies working in the areas in public policy discussions.

As the results of the study are analyzed, we will be disseminating them both to the library community and the policy community, so that the conversation can continue. We expect that not only the results of the study, but also the methods and the indicators that drive the survey questions will be useful for libraries in the future when engaging in discussions with funding agencies. This bridge between the impacts we all know libraries are making, and the agencies that fund them, is probably the most critical issue facing public libraries for the short and long term, and this study should help provide some tools and data to help make that a more effective conversation. You can read more about the study as it develops and track results on the study website. And watch for the online survey in your local library!!!

George Needham

With a bit of help from unofficial panelists Thoreau and Einstein

"Our life is frittered away by detail...simplify, simplify." Henry David Thoreau

Libraries can't all move out to the pond and recuse themselves from the distractions of the day-to-day world as Friend Thoreau did in the 19th century. But I do think that the one critical issue facing libraries today is how to simplify.

Google and Amazon and its ilk have thrown libraries the most wicked curve ball since Sandy Koufax: they offer the promise of simplicity. A search box, a few supporting graphics, and the world of information seems to be at your fingertips. These sites seem to deliver what libraries have been promising for decades. And they do it without resorting to visible classification schemes or fancy-schmancy metadata. (Note I said "visible" here; I am not such a Luddite as to believe these schemes are not operating in the background.) No one ever needed a user’s manual or a tutorial or a bookmark telling them how to use Google.

I believe that the biggest challenge facing libraries right now is how to bring that sort of simplicity to what we do. How can we truly move the backroom operations of the library to the backroom, and focus completely on getting the customer the stuff she needs? Without this kind of simplicity, we run the risk of being made less and less useful.

Think for a moment about the Stanley Steamer automobile. The Stanley Steamer was an amazing vehicle in many ways. It was the bestselling automobile in the United States in 1898 and 1899. The company held the land speed record for an automobile (a mile in 28.2 seconds in 1906) for several years, and had a terrific safety record, despite the boiler. But as Henry Ford and Ransom Olds and other inventor/manufacturers developed easier to use vehicles with simpler starting procedures and less complicated drive trains, the Stanley fell from favor. Throughout the 1910s, the company fought back against what their ads called "internal explosion machines" and tried to woo motorists back to their more "correct" vehicles. By the end of the 1910s the Stanleys had sold their company and by the late 1920s, the marque was gone forever. Oh, and a Steamer cost about eight times as much as a new Ford Model T.

If we're not striving to move toward the sort of simplicity our users have come to expect in the rest of their lives, we could be like the Stanley Brothers, trying to get people to use our expensive and complicated services in the face of competition from cheaper and simpler alternatives.

A couple of years ago, I was doing a presentation at the Pasadena Public Library in California and had made this point. During the Q & A session, a woman in the audience stood up, identified herself as a public library trustee, and accused me of "dumbing down" the library. To me, simplification isn't about dumbing down. To me, this is about equity of access for all users. But to an even greater degree, this is a fight for survival, about making sure that the transformational opportunities which comprise our collections and services aren't obscured by a patina of procedures, rules and "members only" code that keeps the average user out of the mix.

Does this mean we abandon all the systems we've been using in libraries for a 125 years or more and just put keyword searching and folksonomies out there? I don't think so, but I do think this is a world that calls for both simple and advanced searching. We don't live in a binary world, there are and there must be many options. For researchers who need very detailed or obscure information, the systems we have devised and that they have taken the time to learn may be vital. But to most users, they are seen as a barrier.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler." Attributed to Albert Einstein.

Steven Bell

This response appeared on the Talk page of the original article.

Change, Meaning, Simplicity - these are some themes I see emerge from the responses to your question - what is of the greatest concern to you as a leader. In a not so subtle way all of the themes expressed are in response to our hyper-competitive society and information environment and an expectation in economy in which hyper-consumers' expectations far exceed what libraries can deliver. How do we escape the traps of trying to compete while staying relevant to our users.

What about the responses to "what should be done to address this issue"? It could be helpful to pull out studies that show "libraries are important to people" but we need to create some fundamental change that reaches people when they connect with any of the library's touchpoints.

My suggestion for how to address the issues is to further explore how design thinking - and the application of design thinking to the development of a library user experience - could be a good way to address these concerns. One of the outcomes of the process is to identify ways to achieve simplicity and create meaningful experiences. According to the book "The Making of Meaning" there are 15 core meaningful experiences and one of them is "achievement". People derive meaning from their achievements. So how could librarians leverage that to deliver a user experience based on helping people to achieve on their terms.

I have been exploring these processes and ideas as vehicles for making the library more relevant to our users - and as a way to create sensible change (and help library staff adapt to it), to understand what users want in the way of meaning so we can deliver it, and to use design to develop a simpler library organization. We can't make certain information products simpler (such as MLA Bibliography) but we can simplify the process to find an information product (putting the links where they can be found)and to get help when it is needed.

My design page and the blog Designing Better Libraries can be good starting points for those who want to learn more.

What Keeps You Up at Night? (December 2007)

Edited by Walt Crawford. This question kicked off the challenge panel:

What (work-related issue) keeps you up at night currently?

Michele M. Reid

At the top of my list is probably the continuing challenge of staff development. How to keep librarians and other staff abreast of new technologies and help them apply what they learn to strengthen existing services as well as implement new ones? How to secure more funding to cover additional conference and workshop attendance along with webinars and other elearning opportunities? How to budget the time required with the small staff numbers usually found in a typical liberal arts college library? And then how to enable everyone to utilize what we’ve learned while it’s still fresh in our minds, always bearing in mind a wider campus environment that may not be ready or see the need for innovation. Since the pace of change will be rapid for the foreseeable future, how to promote a culture of continuous self-improvement among personnel while keeping their energy level high and avoiding the danger of burnout?

I suppose second on my brief list would be how to galvanize campus-wide support for a digital repository initiative, inevitably on a shoestring? From whence to garner the groundswell of goodwill in addition to the lucre needed for an initial implementation? Then how to prepare to facilitate the project’s continued growth and sustainability?

Richard T. Sweeney

Will libraries and librarians, where I have spent almost my entire career and efforts, stay relevant for the next generation? Did I/we participate in creating the end-of-the-library era, building physical libraries and services that are no longer relevant or will be much less relevant? Will Millennials find relevance and practical advantages from libraries and librarians in say, ten or twenty years, after the Internet, Google, Web 2.0, other advances and their successors?

I think a single model for the future library and one ideal for the future librarian has not only not been revealed, it will likely evolve into a number of “grandchildren” models, if you will, that are so very different they bear little resemblance to what we have known or expect.

Sandra A. Balough

What keeps me up at night currently is the whole discussion of manager versus leader in the “library world.” I keep wondering, how can I not be a manager when I have such an important unit of the University to run? Then I think I need to be a leader. I need to be more involved in the University and the “library world.” I need to volunteer to be on more committees and make sure the mission of the library is made known throughout the land.

Still I come back to “who is minding the store” and what does my staff need to make the library the best that it can be. But if I am not a leader how will we grow and incorporate all of the technology and provide this new group of users everything they need, immediately? This is a vicious cycle. I long for the days when libraries knew their place and the world knew our place too.

Pamela Snelson

Other than the cup of tea I had too late in the evening, there is one question that keeps me up at night. I ask myself if I'm taking the right opportunities to advance the library on my campus and making the right arguments to get the support we need. For example, my library needs expansion space for the collection. While the library has a preferred solution to the problem there are many ways to frame the discussion as we gather support and commitment to the project. We are introducing the idea of an institutional repository to faculty. How best do we secure their cooperation and submission of material? Should we focus on the archival aspect, the shared scholarly communications opportunity or enhanced visibility for the institution—to name only a few arguments. Perhaps the library should use every "trick in the book" but that can result in a muddied, disorganized message.

Merle J. Slyhoff

Having recently attended the OCLC RLG Program Summit “When the Print Hits the Fan: Collaborative Approaches to Managing Print Collections in a Digital Era”, the issue of digital collections looms high on my list of library issues. But thinking about it launches an avalanche of snowballs.

Is it necessary for many libraries--and in some cases every library--to own the same titles, especially for materials that are not frequently consulted? Libraries strive for “ownership,” but what does that mean? If we’re able to meet our patrons’ needs in a “reasonable” amount of time, will that suffice, if it enables us to free up space and budget dollars to be used elsewhere? Will our patrons be willing to wait for their material to be sent from another location, even if it’s faster than traditional ILL? Are they willing to accept digital copies? Who is patrolling the digital world? Are materials being scanned “to code?” Is there a “code” for standardized scanning? Will the digital copies be around in 20 years, after we’ve all tossed the print copies?

One question leads to another, to another, to another, none of which have easy answers. The replies will only come when we meet at the table and begin serious discussions with an end-date in mind to have the answers. The RLG Summit was only the beginning. But when will we meet? And who will be there? And what’s the date? And the snowballs continue…

Sara Weissman

Nothing. I need my seven hours. What most concerns me for our library right now is the spending freeze instituted for the rest of the year and the estimated $45 million (county) shortfall in additions to ratables from which it stemmed. Every indication is that 2008 is going to be a very tight year throughout NJ. We're already talking about how low can you go in staffing and still offer the excellent service your patrons expect and deserve?

And this has come on the heels of our governing authority instituting program budgeting which, next year, is to include the finances of staff hours for any program/item. As there is no proviso here for benefits statements (career seminars matter because ...) we're thinking hard about how you best represent library services within an externally imposed framework.

We'll keep blogging, Flickr'ing, podcasting…because it's free and fun. But once again it's down to brass tacks and rationalizing, but hopefully not rationing, library services.

David G. Schappert

There are two different kinds of challenges that keep me awake at night. Right now, I’ll ignore the exciting kind: the book I don’t want to put down, the idea I want to get on paper (on screen), the 24/7 work-life that both e-mail and a two-librarian marriage facilitate. The exciting ones change a lot; they are the product of different books, different ideas, different conversations and enthusiasms. The other kind is more persistent. Those ideas are the characteristic thoughts of troubled sleep: obsessive, not entirely rational, tinged with confusion and despair.

For example, are the things that we work so hard to do more efficiently and cost-effectively precisely the things we should be doing? Are we measuring those things against real value and impact, or only by the prior relative inefficiencies--X may not be important, but, boy, we sure do it better than we used to. If our traditional resources (personnel, time, money) do not match up with shifting higher education and library landscapes, will the steps we take begin to align them more closely? Do we understand the big picture of our professional struggles sufficiently well to determine when we are in the vanguard and when the rear guard?

The rear guard is not just a failure to change. It might also be, for instance, the bright and shiny new ways that we might teach a certain skill or resource that is increasingly less relevant to our students and faculty. To the extent that we are fighting the last (previous) war, we aren’t really fighting in the vanguard, and knowing what is “the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time,” is not just a matter of foreign policy.

Many people, when they sleep, dream about being chased. But, awake at 3:00 am, what I am chasing (or not) is a much more relevant issue.

Joe Lucia

The things that I wake up worrying over at 4:00 a.m. may or may not be connected to the most critical leadership challenges of the moment, but the reality of pre-dawn phantasms is a feature of my life that reflects the churning turbulence of the current academic library environment.

Pressed into an honest accounting of what most worries right now in my own work environment, I’d have to say that the key worries are “people” matters first. These worries cover a range of related areas, but most of them have to do with the pace of change. Aspects of this include the development of a culture of open intellectual exchange and innovation and, connected with this, the balancing of workplace freedom and accountability so that staff members see the library mission as their own through self-directed work. I am also often troubled by the frustrating division of staff between technical and non-technical areas and the challenge of bridging the gaps so that everyone “owns” the new stuff not just the technologists. In addition, I worry about the difficulty of making a systematic commitment to continuous learning (giving staff adequate work time to explore, experiment and reflect) when people are always busy getting old work finished so that new work can begin.

Beneath all of this is the “überfear” that we might not have a shared vision of our mission and that all this restless activity might not cohere into a richer library experience for our users--that it’s all just activity intended unconsciously to mask our collective anxieties about the dim prospects for libraries in the age ahead.

More particular flavors of this set of staff challenges include:

• Sustaining staff excitement, engagement & momentum in an already prolonged change cycle;
• Being able to pay the best staff what they are worth so that they will stay in my shop, especially in technical areas;
• Managing the implicit tensions between the most productive and least productive members of a staff when both increasing efficiency and fostering new initiatives are imperatives for continued organizational growth;
• Developing a workplace culture where diverse work practices and attitudes can be integrated in the service of a common vision;
• Increasing the collective and individual autonomy of staff while fostering different sorts of accountability--results not rules--when there are still staff who value routines rather than results;
• Getting people to see learning new skills and thinking about the present environment as part of their work;

Yes, I do worry about each of these items--whether they are achievable and what failing to achieve might mean for libraries. Then I go to work each day to face the task of sustaining my own excitement and using that excitement as a tool to engage and fire the imaginations of those who work alongside me.

Editor’s Note

I’m delighted with the range of thoughtful responses to the first challenge. As a Californian, I must admit that one word in Sara Weissman’s contribution gave me pause: “ratables.”

According to American Heritage Dictionary (via Bartleby.com), the relevant meaning is “Properties or buildings, especially those used for commercial purposes, that provide tax income for local government.” Maybe everyone in PALINET’s primary service area knows that instinctively—but a little casual Googling suggests the term is far more commonly used in certain areas, specifically New Jersey. For example, the Google search ratables “New Jersey” yields more than 13,000 “results,” 861 viewable, while ratables California yields a mere 3,070 (404 viewable)—and, checking the first 20 or so of those “California” results, most are actually from or about New Jersey or New York.

Live and learn!

Steven Bell (from the Talk page of the original)

These library leaders express some important issues that probably keep most of us up at night from time to time, as well as dominating our thoughts during the day. Most, if not all, are related to that core concern about relevancy. If we lose our relevancy to our designated user community then nothing else matters. But I think we are all optimistic that as a profession we have the willpower and fortitude to maintain our relevancy, and do more for our users.

What keeps me thinking at night is how we create a library that is a destination. For most people the library is a place they HAVE to go. What if the library could be the place that many people WANT to go. Yes, there are some true library supporters who want to go to the library for that latest bestseller, be read a story or to hear a book talk or to pick up a DVD on the way home from work. But for the vast majority of our community, especially in the academic sector, the user may have no choice but to use the library. It may be required, it may be the only way to pass a course or it may be the only place one has to go for a serious study environment. When there are other choices, especially ones that provide a better user experience, community members will vote with their feet.

As library leaders we need to focus more energy on determining what makes a great user experience for our communities, and then figure out how we can integrate that into our library services. What keeps me up are all the things in the library that are broken, and that I don't even see because I'm too close to them. If we can't fix the broken processes, if things don't work then - well then people won't come. Making sure things work right is a good start, but we'll need to do much more to determine what we do better than others, what we offer that is more unique than the rest and how we convince our users that the library is more than just a portal to an information commodity that they can often get elsewhere more quickly and conveniently. What keeps me up these days is figuring out how we create a unique and memorable experience that makes our community members want to use the library.

Today's Most Pressing Leadership Issue (December 2006)

Edited by Frank Hermes

What do you see as the most pressing issue for library leadership today?

George Needham

I’m not sure it’s the biggest challenge facing library leadership today, but I think one of the things we need to be focusing on is creating user-centered institutions.

For most of the history of libraries, we’ve worked in a world where information was scarce and expensive. If people wanted to use the treasures libraries held, they had to do it on the librarians’ terms, take it or leave it.

That world is as dead as Elvis. People have nearly unlimited choice and access to information today. They have little use and even less regard for our traditional role as gatekeepers of the information storehouse.

To maintain our relevance and create a future role for libraries, library leaders need to start looking at what we do from the outside in. It’s time to get over ourselves. It’s time for us to realize that we are in a service business; a service business that ignores service is no business at all.

If you think that this “deprofessionalizes” librarianship, I would recommend to you the article "McMedical Care", by Penelope Lemov, in the December 2006 issue of Governing magazine. Lemov describes the growth of medical clinics inside retail stores such as Wal-mart and CVS. These clinics, staffed by nurse practitioners who use standardized procedures and protocols to treat mild, predictable ailments like ear infections and colds, are anywhere from 50% to 66% less expensive than having the same treatment in a doctor’s office. Even more important, the clinics are open at times that a regular medical office is closed, allowing people to take care of themselves and their kids without disrupting work and other schedules. If this can happen in health care, how can we think about ways to adjust what libraries do to reflect the real needs of our customers?

Jamie LaRue

Briefly, I believe the most pressing issue for library leadership today is the need to move from passive to active, from retail (waiting for you to come to our store) to wholesale (finding the people who need us). Many librarians in our nation are locked into their own navels; we need to open up, engage with our communities, assist in understanding their problems and needs, and develop solutions that help define and demonstrate the mission of the library.

Gary Strong

The search for relevancy comes to mind as one of the most frustrating and challenging issues we face. Most people (our customers and politicians) do not think negatively of libraries. The problem is that they don't often think of libraries as part of the solution to the challenges facing the broader community.

Library leaders seem to be frustrated that they have to continually promote and put libraries on the community agenda; whether public, academic or school. Let me tell you that every other facet of the public and academic enterprise has the same feeling. When pushed by legislators that there are many issues they must address, I am challenged to help that policy maker understand where libraries fit into the solution or the challenge they have just identified. When a colleague dean challenges that we don't need libraries anymore, I point out that the electronic information that every one of their faculty and students access comes because the library exists and licenses those resources for them at a tremendous savings to the academy.

Building partnerships with non profit community organizations that align with our values helps move public libraries forward in the community view. Partnering with academic departments in improving educational opportunity and research infrastructure so critical to the academic enterprise puts libraries at the table. Another important partnership is when we engage with faculty in the classroom in bringing information literacy skills to students to reinforce the use of quality information in the learning process.

By standing back and complaining about how underappreciated we are, we seem as those who only complain and moan. When we step forward with solutions and engagement we become relevant and involved.

All the best for an involved and exciting new year for libraries!

Mike Crandall

If I had to choose one thing, it would be communicating value. I'm using that phrase as an umbrella to cover a myriad of challenges, but it seems to me that libraries across the board are having an extremely hard time with this as the environment changes around us. Unless we can communicate why libraries are important with well-supported evidence in language that means something to funders and decision makers, our response to those changes will either mean nothing or be a temporary fix. To cite an example: two corporate libraries I was a part of at one time, that were arguably leaders in adopting many new technologies and services, have been gradually downsized, disassembled and parsed out to other departments over the years because there was not a strong voice defining the value of retaining the library as an entity. The functions are still being covered, but not by a central service, and not with as many resources as they had a number of years ago. Somewhere, the message that there was value in the library got lost, with unfortunate results. Similar stories can undoubtedly be told in all types of libraries.

On the other hand, we have some wonderful success stories that show how letting your constituents know why the library is important can not only help the library survive, but thrive. Library Journal's annual Best Small Library awards shows that it's not size or history that counts, but consistent communication and showing value to your community that brings recognition and support. It's not the individual programs or the cool technologies that matter, but what they do for the community. And this bubbles up all the way to the national level, where the message is much harder to shape and communicate among the many other important issues competing for our attention and budget dollars. Our library organizations, from the smallest to the largest, all face the same challenge-- how to communicate value in the most compelling way to the audiences that matter.

This means we have to start teaching this skill early, in our library schools for sure, but also in as many other ways as we can. It's not a single course or a one time learning--formal education is a start, but it's up to all of us to help each other learn as we go. Our own Library Leadership Network is a great example of enabling the larger library community to help each other, through providing a forum for discussion of these issues, with practical advice and concrete examples. Our professional organizations, academic library consortiums, state libraries, library vendors and suppliers, conference organizers, and many other organizations are all potential value communicators, and we need to support and encourage their efforts through whatever means we can. Reaching out to other disciplines and communities to learn from their mistakes and successes is also necessary; we don't know all the answers, and learning from others is a great way to help us find them. Until we understand at all levels in the library community how to present well-supported arguments for our services and offerings in language meaningful to our funders and policy makers, we run the risk of losing the institutions we value so highly ourselves.

Bill Crowe

The most pressing issue for library leadership today is timeless: to identify, recruit, prepare (including mentoring), and retain a diverse body of talented and energetic librarians and allied staff. The goal is to ensure a critical mass of visionary leaders and others skilled in management of complex organizations to promote the evolution of libraries--and allied cultural heritage organizations--in an increasingly, truly global, complex environment. Without capable people who have a worldview and eagerness to learn and experiment, all else is lost.

What to do? Here, too, nothing new: Move in wider circles in the communities we belong to and seek entree to people we do not normally interact with day to day. Talk and write about the issues surrounding us in the information economy and community life and how information professionals of all kinds can and do make a difference. Share the passion for learning that good librarians always have had. Too often, we hang back, and so lose the chance to convey the excitement of our work, and the satisfactions inherent in trying to make a difference every day for the people we serve.

For me, I always have tried to get involved in the life of the universities where I have worked (just ask me about chairing the Parking Commission at Ohio State!). I have joined the usual community groups and have volunteered for civic projects (spending five years as a member of the group that worked to make the 150th anniversary of the settlement of Lawrence KS more than a parade planning exercise was very gratifying). I do my share of talking with students in library schools, but also chat with bright undergrads and grad students who are grappling with career choices, as many of us do. I try to pay attention to new hires across the library system at the University of Kansas (just asking someone to have lunch--to listen--can make all the difference as a young person is getting her or his bearings). In short, I try to reach out and communicate--sending and receiving signals that what we do is work very much worth doing...for our own satisfaction and for society.

All of this seems so obvious, of course, but as we get busy with our own lives and careers there seems never to be enough time to raise one's head a bit and look for a chance to break away (break out?).