2   inFoRmation tECHnoLoGY anD LiBRaRiEs  |  maRCH 2008

Currently we librarians seem to be hitching our wagon to the idea of library as community because in part it’s what we ourselves want. We’ve seen 
that our LITA members want more community from our 
association, so it makes sense to us that our patrons also 
want community. It’s what Pew, OCLC, and other stud-
ies seem to be telling us. The business-wired side of the 
world is breaking their backs to create every form of vir-
tual community they can think of as quickly as possible. 
Apply the appropriate amounts of marketing and then 
our patrons want those things and expect them from all 
of their historically important community resources, the 
library being a prime player in that group. So we strive 
and strive and strive to not only provide the standard 
issue face-to-face community we’ve always created, but 
to also create that new highly desired virtual community. 
Either we create a library-specific version, or we at the 
very least create a way for our patrons to access those 
communities. Hopefully, when our patrons step into 
those virtual communities, we work to make it possible 
for them to find libraries there, too.

All well and good, but do we have a plan? What’s 
the goal? What’s the end achievement? If, as studies say, 
patrons with a research need turn to libraries first only 
one percent of the time, and instead first hit up friends 
and family fifty or more percent of the time, then where is 

our significance and place in either the physical or virtual 
spaces? We know we serve significant numbers in many 
ways. We have gate counts, circulation records, holds 
placed, warm bodies in the building—all manners of indi-
cators that show a well-managed and -marketed library is 
in demand and appreciated.

As we run into the terrible head-on crash of commu-
nity and technology, willy-nilly doing absolutely every-
thing we can to accommodate everyone and everything, 
because we’re librarians and library technologists and 
that’s what we do, do we really have a clue why we’re 
doing it?

All fodder for deep thought and many lattes or beers 
and late night discussions. On the LITA side, though, we’re 
embarking on doing something about this knot when it 
comes to serving our members. Under the guidance of 
Past-President Bonnie Postlethwaite we’ve established an 
Assessment and Research Committee co-chaired by Bonnie 
and Diane Bisom. To kick off the committee activities and 
to help them establish an agenda and direction, LITA hired 
the research firm The Wedewer Group to work with the 
LITA board and the new committee. Stay tuned for reports 
and announcements from this committee as it works to find 
answers to some of those questions. And have that latte 
with a LITA colleague as you seek to find some answers 
yourself. It’s all part of building community. 

mark Beatty (mbeatty@wils.wisc.edu) is LITA President 
2007/2008 and Trainer, Wisconsin Library Services, Madison.

President’s Message: Doing Something 
about Life’s Persistent Problems? Mark Beatty