Week 9 Readings

"Technoplans vs. Technolust" by Michael Stephens was a good article. It made a technology plan simple to understand. I liked how it talked about who should be involved - "administrators, IT personnel, reference librarians, and others, including those who interact with patrons and understand what they want." I was happy that he added those who interact with patrons and that he mentioned that communication is important for staff buy in. Staff seem to be overlooked a lot when decisions are made even though they really know the customers well.

Another good article was "What went wrong? Unsuccessful information technology projects" by Brenda Whittaker. It was helpful in understanding why technology plans failed. It really made a lot of sense and made it clear for me why some projects that happened in my work place failed.

"Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans" by Michael Shuyler was in interesting article. He seemed to think that technology plans were not that helpful and were needed for others and not for those who write them. I liked how he mentioned that they should be flexible and gave an example with things that really happened to him.

"Information technology plans" by Robert Dugan was a really good article. It explained well the process for writing a technology plan. It talks about how it can be a guide for many different things such as identifying weaknesses and strengths concerning technology implementations, letting everyone know what the library is doing, to manage a budget, among many other things. It talked about how information technology plans can be structured three different ways in academic libraries. Where I work, it is part of the strategic plan. It also talked about how to write a plan and what sections are recommended to be included. I think that this article is really helpful.