ARL Fall 2021 Board Meeting

So we managed to have our Fall 2021 ARL Board Meeting in DC with at least a few attendees in person and the rest online in a hybrid format. Things went well and we all had a good time. See my pic below from my morning at 21 Dupont Circle.


ARL Spring 2021 Board Meeting

This week is the time for the ARL Spring 2021 Members Meeting. 

Today I am spending most of my day at the ARL Board Meeting. The great part is that many of the items I have been working on over the last few months have come to fruition. This includes the 2021 audit committee audit report as well as some changes from the governance committee that will help support our values for diversity and inclusion. I am really happy to be on the ARL Board and represent our many great research libraries in north america. It is a great group and I do hope that others in the community will consider volunteering to be on the board at some point in the future.

Since we are meeting on zoom, I took a picture.


Change is hard but the outcomes can be worth it

I have promised myself that I would write a bit more on this blog so that I can actually write something rather than just thinking about writing something. I just moved my entire professional blog over from wordpress to posthaven (seemlessly via the domain https://mcdonald.ly), mostly to avoid maintenance issues. I really wanted to move to something like jekyll on a serverless AWS setup, however, my work of late does not give me much time for dabbling in technology. If it is not a system I can use all the time like posthaven, then I will not use it.

Now that I have made my intro I wanted to talk a bit about change. My library is a great library and the teams that work for me are excellent. We are going through a new major strategic plan and reorganization related to that plan that will enable, I hope, a better execution of our new strategic plan. In doing this reorganization I looked at many different agile models because after many years of using agile as a scrum master, I knew that this could enable more agency for my teams in the library.

For our reorganization, we used a model that builds from the bottom up by having all areas built from the smallest components. We call these sections and the sections build to teams and the teams build to chapters within our organization. So far, many in our libraries are feeling more agency and are seeing a change. I know that is not true for every chapter, team and section but with time and the practice of good agile methodology, I think we will see the change that will help us develop our next generation library.

So far so good... We have not moved as quickly as I originally planned, but we did not plan on the COVID pandemic nor did we plan on working remotely and supporting a closed stacks library operation for the past year. I praise everyone working in our libraries today for making us stronger and more resilient in all that we do and we celebrate them this time of year for #NationalLibraryWeek and for #NLWD.