I’m currently sitting in the Denver Airport, waiting on my connection to Aspen, on my way to the Aspen Institute Leadership Roundtable on Library Innovation. The previous library work done at Aspen, their Dialogue on Public Libraries, was interesting and well done, and I am very excited to be a part of this new effort.
At the same time, I am wary of small groups “representing” libraries or librarians. I did a quick check of the attendee list (not currently public, but will be at some point, I imagine) and it could do better on both female/male balance (12/18) and representation of racial diversity (a rougher count, because I don’t want to assume too much about racial makeup or identification based on a name and photo, puts that at 23/7). It’s an impressive list of people, and I can’t wait to work with them. It will be very interesting to see the final makeup of the group, and to pay attention to the process of the working group as we dig into the issues.
The roundtable starts officially tomorrow, with working groups going non-stop Monday and Tuesday before wrapping up Wednesday. I will be doing my best to tweet as we go…I’m not great as a live-tweeter, especially if I’m trying to stay involved in the discussions and be useful. But I’ll do my best to do what I can, especially if assumptions are being made that I feel are questionable…that sort of thing I will throw out and hope to get some feedback on in realtime from the Twitter masses.
2 replies on “The Aspen Institute Leadership Roundtable on Library Innovation”
[…] also just spent most of this past week at the Aspen Institute Leadership Institute on Library Innovation as a part of their Communications […]
[…] and most thoughtful people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. As I mentioned in my initial post about the Roundtable, I was concerned about diversity in the voices in the room, and while I’m not qualified to […]