What’s probably my major eye-roller about libraries is planning. We don’t. Oh, we say we do. We have lots of meetings talking about planning to plan, the need to plan, and the consequences of not planning. We even have a lot of paperwork about planning, including, usually, some cool planning documents, appropriately spiced with mission and vision statements, themselves the product of hours of angst per syllable. When you add it all up, the meetings with a few dozen people, the committees, the hallway discussions, and all the consternation, we spend tens of thousands of dollars on planning.
Then when the time comes, we go do something else. This is so true that our computer support planning document now basically says we’re going to keep on truckin’. Yup. We’re gonna keep on keepin’ on, and that’s our job. Hidden in this little missive is an implicit part of our job, which is an attempt to keep everyone as much out of trouble as possible while at the same time keeping them from getting too angry at us for doing it. But basically we’re trying to give ourselves enough slack so that we have time to do all the things people think of between the time they plan and when it really happens. To be fair, this is not always somebody’s fault. It occurs because, well, things happen. This year we decided we had to do “timeout,” which limits patrons to 60 minutes per day. This entailed figuring out how to do it, then visiting each of 150 PCs with significant software changes, a great deal of staff coordination and training, and 4 or 5 months to get everyone on board-some very enthusiastically, and some very reluctantly.
Should we have done this? It’s policy. It’s politics. It had to be done. It was serious. Meanwhile, what we’d actually planned to do, which was spend some quality time on network security, had to be placed on the back burner while we put out the forest fire impeding our progress. In the case above we dealt with an “unknown unknown.” There are those things you know you don’t know (thus requiring further research), but there are also things that suddenly come up that you had no idea were going to become issues. Sometimes they are prompted by outside influence, and sometimes they come from within, when someone suddenly thinks of a good idea that would be really nice, if only computer services would do it.