Many thanks to my colleague, Katie Birch, for pointing out a relatively random Wikipedia page about “Doing more with less.”
“David Simon has professed that despite being an oft-repeated command to dying institutions, the ability to do more with less is an inherent impossibility.”
Please don’t infer that I am calling libraries “dying institutions.” My more radical point is that a library who says they are attempting to do more with less is pigeon-holing itself in the ‘dying institution’ category with that mindset.
As a systems librarian, my professional goal has always been to implement efficiency into library workflows (with, admittedly, the occasional whiz-bang, cool tool for coolness’ sake). So efficiency, to me, means an opportunity to do more with the same amount of resources, something that could be possible.
There’s been a lot of buzz this week about OCLC WorldShare, one of the first implementations of which is WMS (WorldShare Management Service), which libraries are using to create efficiency at the local level. WorldCat has allowed them to be more. But I don’t want to use that as my example today. OCLC WorldShare is also the moniker for the newly released platform.
The announcement of the OCLC WorldShare App Gallery, part of the OCLC WorldShare Platform, was made on Monday. The App Gallery was launched with a handful for new apps that use a handful of new services that OCLC is now exposing. Over the past two days, there was a Mashathon in Frankfurt. Today, there are eight new Apps!! This means there will be more Apps in the OCLC WorldShare App Gallery. The Gallery is more with what we already had. Libraries can be more with what they already have. Very cool.
