Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. In their new book, The Innovator's DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gergersen, and Clayton M. Christensen build on the idea of disruptive innovation to explain how and why the Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses of the world are so successful.

Attendees of the "Play, Learn, Innovate" Symposium on June 7-cosponsored by OCLC and Library Journal-came to get a glimpse of how playfulness and game-like programs and activities might stimulate interest in patrons and innovation among the staff. What they got was a two-hour primer on how a shift away from content consumption may offer libraries a new role in fostering user engagement and promoting creative output. More than 1000 users registered for the session, with some 500 attending live.

Eric's current comments about his "old" posting: In a slightly dated LITA-hosted blog posting [1] I addressed this question, and below are snippets from my reply: 1) XML - XML is a sort of modern-day alchemy. 2) Relational databases - Libraries love lists. 3) Indexing - Believe it or not, databases suck as facilitating search, especially considering today's user expectations regarding relevance ranking. 4) Web serving - Increasingly people expect to acquire the information the require for learning, teaching, and research through a Web browser. 5) Programming/scripting - Finally, you will want to "glue" all of the above technologies together into a coherent whole. Please do not be overwhelmed. All of these things can be learned and practiced on your desktop or home computer. They lend themselves better to server-class operating systems such a Unix/Linux, but learning about these operating systems is challenging in itself and not readily applicable to librarianship. All you need is the ability to read books, the desire to learn, and the time to do it.

"It's time for younger librarians to claim the future. I was intrigued when I saw an announcement for an ARL-CNI meeting, "Achieving Strategic Change in Research Libraries", to be held in mid October, because Lord knows this is a good time for strategic change. Yet when I clicked through to the program, I was sorely disappointed. The program is oriented toward library directors talking amongst themselves. In the growing string of strategy meetings and whitepaper collections coming from research library organizations, I see many familiar names. While I find these individuals to be brilliant, thoughtful people, I don't believe much will come out of their talking amongst each other for another day. Library leadership has been discussing emergent roles for libraries for over a decade."

In 2008, WebJunction received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a set of competencies for those managing public access computing in their libraries. As a follow-up to this work, we developed a full Competencies Index for the Library Field, which outlines the full spectrum of library practice. The Index was published in 2009, and since July 2009, we've been using this index to help us identify the topics library staff most need to develop new skills or support around. WebJunction's Competencies for Libraries outlines recent research we've completed in this area.

"To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone."

So how do you take these Digital Native realities and build a set of strategies that support your organization's digital initiatives, especially when technology is quickly and constantly shifting? More information about our users and their expectations--and as a result, the skills we will need in order to make these new tools and experiences a reality.

I think the "engagement, enrichment, and empowerment" ideas are really important for us and our future skill sets. We don't know how to do any of these really well, imo, (but especially the enrichment part) and we need to learn more techniques and strategies for interacting with our users in the spaces they prefer. Whether these user needs are the result of nature or nurture, we are going to have to pay attention to them if we want to continue to be of value.

As research library leaders confront turbulent times, they sorely need new tools to facilitate thinking about the future of the institution and to foster dialogue within the community. ARL's new project seeks to envision library futures and will engage the Association's member community in looking decades out at the situations that will confront research libraries. At the heart of this work will be the creation of a set of future scenarios and a toolkit to facilitate research library leaders in their planning and decision making.

More about the future that is heading our way...

These are my slides from the panel I did at TLA with Stephen Abram and John Blyberg. You know, if you look at these slides, you will find out everything I am secretly planning! :-)

In the 21st century, ARL libraries are increasingly exploring and adopting a range of new roles in serving research institutions, researchers, scholars, and students, making the time ripe for ARL to organize a new report cluster focusing on key new roles. The series will identify and delineate emerging roles and present research on early experiences among member libraries in developing the roles and delivering services.

Interesting discussion of job description for new position at Karen Schneider's library. You can see the the 21st century librarian is going to have to know a lot about a lot in order to be able to function and to be successful...

Excerpt: "Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Wideners collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Googles massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform."

A blog posting by Meredith Farkas, from a technology point of view. Includes basic technology skills/attitudes and higher level competencies, such as project management. This is the stuff she wishes someone had emphasized when she was in library school!