IFLA Journal

As the Information Age has given rise to the Intelligence Age, institutions of all kinds are challenged to adopt a culture of constant innovation. Innovation is the broad term and includes the concepts of invention, ingenuity, and improvisation. Organizations go through a process of inquiry, instigation, insight, initiation, imagination and inspiration, and inlightenment to ultimately achieve innovation. However, the road to full innovation offers many options like creating an incubator or being iterative, instantaneous, incomplete, or infectious in approach to innovating. To begin the innovative process, organizations must be willing to look at all aspects of their operations, make long-term commitments to funding, accept the possibility of some failure, and look seriously at their missions, value systems and value propositions. Organizations that are insular, inflexible, in-bred, insincere about innovating, insecure in their ability to deliver, and operate independently are more likely to disappear or diminish in their influence because their environment and culture will not sustain innovation.

The National Library of Singapore was set up in 1960, and has been working tirelessly to transform itself to meet the changing needs of its end users. From the early days when users had to travel to visit the National Library in Stamford Road to today’s users who carry a variety of digital devices and mobile gadgets and prefer to access content online, the needs of its users have changed dramatically. This gives the National Library tremendous opportunities to prototype, innovate, and to come up with new ways of serving its users wherever they are, 24 by 7, using any device they hold in their hands.

The National Library of the Netherlands, (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, hereafter KB), has been innovating its services and organization for the past 20 years and expects to continue to do so in the future. The central question in this article is: what makes innovation work in the organization of the KB? We will focus on two use cases: the development of the recently opened Delpher portal, giving access to 30 million pages of digitized Dutch heritage, and the current development of the KB ResearchLab that gives internal and external researchers a platform for experiments. A review of innovation theory and practice (Balk 2013) provides us with a checklist of factors that determine the innovation capacity of a library, grouped in four themes: Leadership and culture, Knowledge and organizational learning, Collaboration capacity and Organizational design. By applying this innovation checklist to the use cases discussed, we hope to contribute to the body of best practice in innovation in national libraries. Finally, we will look ahead at the development of the National Digital Library of the Netherlands, integrating services for the public library community into the KB in the near future and share some potential scenarios for the future of the library landscape in the Netherlands with the audience.

The New Library of Alexandria performs a unique 21st century role as a library, a museum, an art gallery, an archive, an academy, a conference center, a science center, a university, and a special school. By blending today’s information and communications technology with yesterday’s rich cultural heritage and national memory, the Library of Alexandria has shown that innovation from the top down preserves the past and guarantees a future.

The new National Library of Qatar is introduced, beginning with the announcement of the planned library, its core mission, the staffing, the services, and the collections as it readies itself for opening day. A unique open concept architecture was selected that invites exploration and creativity by library users. The National Library will also serve as a central university library in Education City as well as a metropolitan library for all the citizens of Qatar. This article also demonstrates an innovative method of merging all collections regardless of the intended audience.

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (known by its acronym, BAnQ) is a relative newcomer to the city and is in many respects unique, at least among the library and information community. Born from the successive merging of three institutions, it inherited their respective mandates that would form the heart of its mission: the mandates of a national library, national archives and public library. There can be no doubt that this merger was central to the institution’s originality and forms the basis of its innovative initiatives. A Québec government corporation under Québec’s Ministry of Culture and Communications (ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec), BAnQ’s three-fold mission is to acquire, permanently preserve and promote Québec’s heritage materials. Among other similar Canadian provincial institutions, it is the only one that has the mandate of a national library, while Library and Archives Canada fulfills that role for the country as a whole.

The Oral History and Folklore Collection at the National Library of Australia is a research archive; a substantial collection of unpublished audio recordings of varying length and levels of documentation created by and for researchers. These recordings are often extensive and difficult to navigate; even so they are a much appreciated resource for a wide variety of users, from family historians to professional writers. Following a long running preservation program, the majority of the collection has been digitized to archival standards and user copies made which preserve access to the primary document itself, that is, the voice. To allow users to discover and have access to the primary source sound recording, and to be able to locate specific content within those recordings, the National Library of Australia has developed a time-linked search and delivery system and a schema to enable it to be searched by its innovative aggregation platform, Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au). The Library’s Audio Management and Delivery System currently makes nearly 7,000 hours or 13 percent of the Oral History and Folklore collection publicly available, and content continues to be added. This paper describes the development of that system and considers the nature of innovation within a library environment.

Like libraries and librarianship in general, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) has in recent years been confronted with technology-driven changes in the information environment. These changes mean a considerable challenge in terms of the mandate of the DNB and the way to fulfill it. To cite one important example: how will DNB deal with a collection mandate extended to digital publications of all kinds, including the obligation to record these publications and make them available for current and future generations? How does it manage to remain a highly visible lighthouse in the seas of data and information? This will not happen accidentically, but will be the result of careful planning, determined actions, and continuous monitoring, based on a clear strategy and a systematic approach, and it means that processes and functions will have to be revised, terminated or newly established. The DNB has always considered itself as an innovative institution – the necessity to be open for recurring innovations and to initiate such developments has become more and more urgent. The DNB has, therefore, started a strategic process in 2013 to respond to this requirement. This process is new to the institution and its members and demands a lot of learning and preparation. A major first step was the definition of strategic goals for the years 2013 to 2016, complemented by a project for organizational development. These goals help the DNB to focus itself and they serve as a guideline for prioritizing projects and tasks. Examples for strategic priorities are a substantial increase in the collection of digital and web resources, development and implementation of automated cataloguing processes, stepping up digitization efforts, and building up an infrastructure for long-term preservation of digital content. However, there are other areas to be attended to and other challenges to be met – the strategic process and the organizational development are, for DNB, tools to continuously follow-up on innovation. This article intends to address the topic coming from two directions: On the one hand we describe the process development in DNB, and on the other hand we name examples and working areas, which might be relevant factors to successfully master the future.

In recent years, librarianship in China has encountered new opportunities and challenges due to unprecedented changes in the political, economic, social and technical environment in China. In order to keep up with these changes, the National Library of China is devoted to the transformation of libraries in innovative ways. It has undertaken much exploration in the development of digital libraries, social education, preservation and conservation of cultural heritages and integration and display of library resources. It has also launched major projects including the Digital Library Promotion Project and ‘Chinese Memory’ and built the National Museum of Classic Collections to promote extensive reading activities. All these efforts have achieved positive results.

The British Library’s GBP 33m Newspaper Programme, which is now nearing completion, was established to address a range of legacy issues associated with ensuring the long term storage, preservation and access to the UK’s national newspaper collection, one of the largest and most comprehensive newspaper collections anywhere in the world with more than 750 million pages of newspapers spanning more than three centuries. The programme has delivered a purpose-built state-of-the-art storage facility, with a fully automated retrieval system and full temperature and humidity control, that will enable the British Library’s print newspaper collections to be kept in archival standard conditions for the first time ever. A new service proposition – the Newsroom – has been created at St Pancras which will, through a combination of collecting and connecting and by combining traditional print and microfilm newspaper content with television and radio broadcast news recordings and with web news into an integrated offering, transform the traditional newspaper reading room concept into a hub for news and media. Increased digitization will both enable online access and protect the original newsprint from further wear and tear. The paper reports on a number of innovative solutions which have been adopted in taking the Newspaper Programme forward – in particular in relation to digitization funding models, storage solutions, onsite service provision, and accessibility – and as such it provides a case study in national library innovation.