Technology and law library administration

St. John's Law Review, Winter 1996 by Price, M Kathleen

play the same score. But each plays a different part. They play together, but they rarely play in unison. There are more violins, but the first violin is not the boss of the horns; indeed the first violin is not even the boss of the other violins. And the same orchestra can, within the short span of an evening, play five pieces of music, each completely different in its style, its scoring, and its solo instruments.

Id. at 206. In business however, unlike music, the score is written as you go along. Id. Therefore, it is vital in an information-based organization that all the players agree upon and clearly understand management objectives. Id.

It is also important for an organization to decide what information it truly needs to operate. See PETER F. DRUCKER, MANAGING FOR THE FUTURE, THE 1990S AND BEYOND 328-331 (1992) [hereinafter DRUCKER, FUTURE]. "[M]any levels of management in fact manage nothing. They make no decisions." Id. at 329. "If a company can organize itself around its information needs, these layers become redundant." Id.

While computers and electronic information systems turn out data, "data is not information." Id. "Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose." Id. An organization must make decisions about what information it needs to operate or otherwise "it will drown in data." DRUCKER, FUTURE, supra at 329.

10 See JENNIFER CARGILL & GILESA M. WEBB, MANAGING LIBRARIES IN TRANSITION 22-23 (1988) (stating there are various organizational structures that can be formed by using both bureaucratic and parallel organizations, and libraries may now have completely different hierarchies where once they were identical from one library to another). "The concurrent use of bureaucratic and parallel organizations involves employees in two ways through different, but formal, structures. It expands the job opportunities of participants by means other than promotion and institutionalizes creativity." Id. at 23.

See Id.

Parallel organizations provide opportunities to develop and grow, making organizations more responsive to environmental pressures. The result is better communication, problem solving and planning skills, better interpersonal relations, improved motivation and morale, higher productivity, increased supervisory skills, and better use of resources. Through the use of parallel organizations, employees are grouped in new ways, giving them challenging opportunities to learn and grow, accessing resources and power. Id.

* See BUCKLAND, supra note 8, at 19. The MARC formats for catalog records determine whether the records can be transmitted from one computer to another. Id. The current national and international standard formats are now more than twenty years old. Id. "Although rather complicated and cumbersome, [the format] provides a degree of standardization in record format that is an essential basis for the economical development of the automated library." Id.

19 See BUCKLAND, supra note 8, at 20. The automation of circulation records made the next task enabling on computer to "search and retrieve" from another