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Creating Your Own Environmental Scan
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Creating Your Own Environmental Scan
3:41 PM EDT 7/12/05
If you've been around the profession as long as I have (Melvil Dewey and I were not classmates, as some have reported; we were two grades apart...) you know that trends in planning come and go. Some have long lasting results, some don't. The OCLC environmental scan's impact has been pretty amazing. In the 18 months since it was released, we've been invited to do hundreds of talks, we've distributed thousands of copies of the report, and the book has been used in academic, public and special libraries for planning, fund raising, and creating a dialogue with elected officials.

An environmental scan is a way of looking at the world in which you operate, to try to make sense out of the factors that affect you. You pick several areas that could make difference in your world (we call them landscapes in the OCLC report), and you do some thinking, some research, and, most important, some conversations with the people who affect those areas. Then you connect the dots, that is, put the results in focus to see how your library will be affected or can affect what's happening in your community.

Alane Wilson, one of the authors of the OCLC scan, has done a nice introduction to environmental scanning on the blog we do (along with Alice Sneary) called "It's All Good." You can find the blog at http://scanblog.blogspot.com/.

In this subject area, we'd like to talk about your experiences with scanning the environment. Or with strategic planning in general. What has worked for you? What's been a disappointment?
Re: Creating Your Own Environmental Scan
6:45 PM EDT 7/14/05 as a reply to George Needham.
WJ did a program a few months ago with one of our members, Bob Watson (librarybob) in IL. In that program (view recording) Bob talked about "library ecologies" much in the same way that the environmental scan talks about the "library landscape". I really appreciated Bob's perspective because it reminded us that the library does not operate in a vacuum; it's connected to every other individual and organization in the community where it serves, and all of the elements are interdependent. "I want them all to be on my side," I remember him saying. It's an important thing to remember when we find ourselves saying "I don't have time to scan ... anything!" (Something we all feel sometimes, I think.) Scanning can help us identify all the ways we are connected to the communities we serve, ultimately allowing us to serve them (and them us) better all around.

(Bob, I hope you'll chime in here - seems right up your alley! Given some of the things you've posted here at WJ about "Demonstrating Impact," it seems that you've done your own environmental scan....how did you make time for it?)