The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
LC 21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress
Recommendation: Extending Library internships to both graduate and undergraduate students from professional schools and other academic institutions appears to have been successful and should be used more widely.
Recommendation: The Library of Congress leadership must encourage a culture of innovation and learning in the Library. Actively nurturing the development of staff to take on the next generation of responsibilities is a vital but neglected area of management in LC.
Recommendation: Teams of persons with unlike skills should be created, whereby those with more technical prowess are encouraged to help those with less. Such teams should be responsible for a real product or function and should have an identifiable audience or customer. The Whole-Book Pilot Program exemplifies an approach that should be adapted for other contexts.
Recommendation: A formal assessment and report of lessons learned from the Integrated Library System implementation should be prepared and completed by January 1, 2001, with an emphasis on findings that can guide future projects.
Recommendation: Human resources staff—both in the Human Resources Services Directorate and within the major service units—should become agents of change and business partners more rapidly than is foreseen in the HR21 plan.
Strategic Planning and Executive Management
The Library’s ability to accomplish its fundamental mission is hampered by insufficient integration of strategic vision with an understanding of the nature, power, and impact of information technology. The question is not how to add or empower technical expertise, but how to suffuse the management and planning processes of the Library with a profound awareness of current and future technological developments.
Finding: Current decision making at the Library regarding information technology is neither transparent nor strategic. In particular, the lines distinguishing central responsibility from service unit responsibility are unclear.