Implementing ICT in Public Libraries: Eindhoven, a Case Study

New information and communications technology has a tremendous effect on enormously the quantity, diversity and quality of information transmission and hence the work of the public library as information broker. It is worth noting that this effect is not just limited to the supply side of information transmission, but that it applies within the process of information transmission, that is to say within the core business of the library. There is therefore no question of a process that adds additional functions to the service package already existing but rather of a process that impinges on the core functions of the library in their entirety. This means that whether the library wishes or not to incorporate the new information and communications technology is no longer an open question. It will have to do it – on pain of being marginalized within the field of information to an institution with more or less the character of museum. In order to retain and enhance its central position of information broker, the library world will have to maintain its selection of material, the accessibility of its data and the provision of information and support to library users, update and innovate it. In addition the library world will have to realize that the physical entity library is in need of revision due to the emergence of the virtual library. There is an urgent need for redefinition of the physical entity library. In all of this the question whether libraries will succeed in incorporating ICT into their services is not the main issue. The key question is whether the new developments will overtake the libraries or whether the libraries themselves will take charge. To enable libraries to take charge of these developments in the area of new information and communications technology, a choice has been made in this report for a step-by-step description of the implementation of ICT within an existing library organization. A summary of more or less successful ICT developments in libraries in recent years has not been included. Such reviews already exist, often concentrating on the obstacles and providing in many instances a summary. Added to that they provide the professional with no substantive guidance when incorporating ICT, either independently or in collaboration with others. The latter is emphatically the intention of this approach. 5 Within this report attention will first be devoted to the conditions under which an ICT library project can …