Introduction Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger 1 The premise of this book is really quite simple. First, the concept of adding value is ban- died about in the management, marketing, and strategic planning literature but is rarely broken down and discussed so that anyone can really understand the concept and, more importantly, learn how they can add value in the work that they do. Second , change is all around us and affects us as individuals mightily and our libraries, museum, galler- ies, and archives in some pretty significant ways. In addition, many observers believe that the rate of change is accelerating, which is also a cause for concern. So perhaps it would be prudent to explore what forces in our society, and in the field of information technology specifically, are affecting our lives and our treasured institutions of libraries, museums, galleries, and archives, and discover how organizations need to change in order to add value for their customers. Third , libraries and other cultural institutions have a long history of adding value when access to books and other physical objects was limited by the cost of acquiring them. These organizations developed ways of organizing their physical collections and providing intellectual access by developing catalogs (and rules to guide the creation of metadata for the catalog). The many ways libraries added value to the traditional library were identified and discussed by Robert Taylor in his classic 1986 book Value-Added Pro- cesses in Information Systems. Fourth , given the significant amount of change we are all experiencing in our lives and our increasing dependence on the Internet, people are no longer required to visit xiii
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