Developing a Shared Vision for the Library of the Future

Every successful library project begins with floor plans, and an opportunity to develop the future. Basically, start your library planning and analysis by asking this question: What do we most want this institution to become?

The architecture, the collections, the technology, and the service model will follow from your analysis. Indeed, opportunities are rarely self-evident. They must be discovered, articulated, and agreed upon before the first line is drawn. This is user engagement work and vision development, and it is foundation of our library planning methodology.

Vision development is an opportunity to use your imagination. We normally ask library staff and stakeholders to project what the library will look like in five years forward. We ask them to describe, in realistic and concrete terms, the access and service plan it needs.

The workshop or exercise is part speculative dreaming and objective analysis. It is part of the architectural construction process and critical to the roadmap you create. Certainly, shared futures affect every subsequent design decision and outcome.

Five-Year Horizon

Shared Vision

Set the clock forward. Imagine that five years have passed and the library you most wanted to create now stands around you. Your task, as a library leader, is to describe it. What do you wish to see? What do you realistically think you will see, try to walk through, and visualize.

Developing future vision or forward projection is the heart of the user engagement and/or library planning workshop.

We have experienced libraries that were liberated at the end of this exercise. They were aligned as a community. Yes, they saw the constraints of present circumstance (funding, space, etc.), and its holding them back. This is why libraries should invest in the future. Learning through user engagement enables you to feel it now, the future and the future backward.

Every member of library community should have the opportunity to respond to each of the sample questions that follow. The vision belongs to all of them, and it holds only if all of them have shaped it.