If I didn’t bring in enough clients, or I didn’t get paid on time, or didn’t have savings, or had a larger tax bill than anticipated because I didn’t pay enough in quarterly taxes, then financially things could get dicey. Occasionally I would have to put groceries on my credit card or just eat really cheap. Now that I work in a library, I don’t have to worry about anything like that (and I got my car paid off too!).

I had also considered the wasted time and effort should a project fail or become too bloated by moving beyond its original scope, but I don’t think I fully appreciated the downside. As Steven Covey says, “put first things first,” and I find that to be valuable to think about even as a web designer within the organization.

I actually write a piece of open source software that improves image viewing for CONTENTdm digital collections, and have shared it with the community. I’ve gotten requests for improvement, and would love to spend hours and hours on it, but I find it difficult to balance my time working on improvements to the software with my main responsibilities at work. It’s the balance between catering closely to our own patrons, and trying to make a wider impact in the library community as well, and calculating that time might be one library equivalent of a “go for it or punt” situation.

Thanks again for the interesting response!
Brian

So you can make a case that no librarian risks everything they personally own (or all that the library holds) when taking an entrepreneurial venture. But if you look at what some libraries have done, you can certainly see the hallmarks of entrepreneurial spirit in their efforts. Getting back to risk taking, yes, I think there are risks that extend beyond mere embarrassment. For example, plowing considerable budget dollars into developing an extensive tutorial or a piece of open source software. No, the library staff don’t risk losing their own money, but it’s still taking a risk because what you lose is the opportunity to invest the money elsewhere – which ultimately hurts the user community.

It also depends on what you mean by “bad”. No, no one will suffer harm, hopefully no one will lose their job; the stakes may not be quite that high. But if you are a library administrator who invests budget dollars into a project that is risky (no clear sense of success or return – but with real potential) and it fails, you might have to explain to a provost what happened to those funds and the outcome may be worse than embarrassment. And it might be that it doesn’t really matter if the only risk is embarrassment. Fear of embarrassment may be all the excuse a librarian needs to punt.

Let’s say you have an idea to eliminate the reference desk and perform all reference by cell phone. That’s a pretty radical departure from the traditional process, and not without a variety of risk on multiple levels (embarrassment, having colleagues lose faith in you or questioning your judgement, lost opportunities, and some possible financial risk as well). If it fails there might be a signifcant dropoff in reference activity and it might be a challenge to bring back the users. Again, no one is losing everything, but it’s be worse than just saying “well, i guess i figured wrong on the one”. The important thing is that at least something new was tried, and that the librarian didn’t just punt when faced with a decision to risk change or play it safe and stay the same.

I wonder how others would answer Brian’s question.

Here’s my question: Are there any real risks to be taken in the library world? Whenever I hear people talking about taking risks, I honestly get confused because I have never seen a risk actually be taken. Innovations have been made, but there seems to be no risk involved. No “to go for it on fourth down or not” situations, where if you make the wrong call something bad will actually happen. It seems like the only risk is a risk of embarrassing ones self, and I personally don’t consider that a risk (so that may be just my definition).

What risks are there?
Brian