Unit 8

This was quite a bit of reading, took me a bit longer than it should have to get through the reading.
First, a couple thoughts.  Planning takes time, having a good strategic plan is important for an organization to identify and attain goals.  A good strategic plan will consist of having a strong technology based component.  I have seen many strategic plans, usually they are decent and appear to be well thought out, but I am just not sure how they go about ASSESSING the attainment of a strategic plan.  So many people know what they want, but they do not know how to reach it.  Additionally, we gather a lot of data but we do not all have the ability to data mine the information to find patterns in the information.  It all comes down to time.  The advent of technology has caused a society that likes information fast, and some things just require time, which we cannot always afford.  Libraries can be lean workplaces, that is, there is not always enough staff to really put time into learning how to gather statistical information, or participate in professional development opportunities.  As a former library staff member, training was focused on librarian development and not support staff.  Someone has to run the day to day operations of the library.
All right, so the train of musing ends.  I believe the document that was the most useful to me was the "State of the Union" article by Eric Chabrow.  Highlighting the difficulties and pitfalls really made me consider issues with strategic plan, and specifically consider issues with technology plans.  All libraries seem to want the same things, and the write it down in a pretty format as they need to as a means of getting government funding for certain projects.  I just do not feel the oversight over technology projects is there.
That being said, I do see myself working on technology plans in the future.  I have enough technology ability that I could be a contributing member of a team.  I do wish I could take a class on statistics first, so I could see what all this data mining business is about.