You need an R&D culture, not an R&D department

A couple of weeks ago, a tweet popped up in my feed just begging for a click-through:

Yes. A thousand times yes. @adr "Libraries need their own R&D Departments." http://t.co/7yHtZKsS… — Gillian Byrne (@redgirl13) February 27, 2012

What Gilliian was so excited about was this post by Daniel Messer on the Letters to a Young Librarian blog.  The core of Messer’s arguments is this:

Libraries need their own R&D Departments. We have Circulation, Reference, Information Technology, and so on. We are sorely lacking in R&D.

I can see why some librarians were enthused by this proposal. It stands to reason that if something is important it should have its own department and funding.  There’s just a small problem - Messer’s solution is destined to fail.

The problem with an R&D department is that it will perpetuate exactly the problem Messer has identified.  Libraries already have R&D departments, it’s just that they are largely outsourced.  We outsource development of cataloguing classification systems to organisations like OCLC and the Library of Congress.  We outsource our ILS to software vendors.  We outsource our journal databases to other software vendors and publishers.  We outsource the development of hardware like PCs, microfilm readers and printing facilities. Some libraries outsource their physical processing to specialist companies.  Others outsource the selection of new material.  We do all these things because it is perceived to be easier, or more efficient, or higher quality.  Often it is.

As Messer has identified, however, there is a problem with outsourcing like this - the priorities of the organisation doing your research and development often has different priorities to your organisation.  As a Systems Librarian, I spend a lot of my time dealing with this reality.  The problem I have with Messer’s solution, however, is that it simply replicates this problem within the organisation.  If you bring all your R&D in-house by creating an organisation called ‘The R&D Department’, what happens when they realise their small team and small budget can’t solve every problem at the same time?  The have to prioritise. Somebody’s ‘top priority’ will be pushed down the list.  Pretty soon you’ll be writing blog posts bitching about the R&D department and suggesting libraries need to become more efficient by outsourcing their R&D to vendors.

What libraries - and other service organisations - need to do is not create an R&D department but rather create an R&D culture.  Given the whole point of libraries is to facilitate research, one would think we should have a head start! Organisations like Google and Gore don’t rely on R&D departments to do all their research and development - both famously offer/require staff 20% of their paid time for working on whatever R&D project takes their fancy.  Tim Harford writes about adaptive organisations like Google and Gore in Adapt: why success always starts with failure.  One of his main points is that (As Messer himself describes) those at the ‘front line’ are best placed to understand what is needed in terms of developing new strategies, procedures or tools.  R&D is not just about new tools - it’s about new processes, new services, and new concepts for delivering those services.

Messer himself gives us a perfect example - he developed a small program to get his ILS to print patron names on a receipt printer.  Messer didn’t work for ‘the R&D department’ when he did this - he was running Circulation. Messer’s role had a enough ‘slack’ in terms of how he spent his time to allow him to research what he needed to do and develop and test it.

The challenge for libraries then is not to build a new department, but to create the space and encouragement for staff to undertake research and development as simply part of their job.  Last week Rory Litwin wrote in a rather more controversial blog post that

In order to make a claim to professional autonomy, librarians need more than a set of admirable values to justify it. They need a body of professional expertise that is incontrovertible, made up of knowledge and skills that others recognize required extensive education to gain. They need to be able to make the case that what they offer as professionals is something that other pe