Bruuuuuuuuuce

March 18th, 2005

Some notes from yesterday:

Bruce James from the GPO is the keynote for the morning. A few neat facts:

+ In 1994, they charged for access of the CR via the web, a year later, they changed their minds.
+ He had to turn a 19th century institution and “turn it to the right.”
+ The GPO is a strategic vision.
+ You can’t make big level of changes without getting your own way at times.

What they did….

1) Reorg the GPO to “make things happen”
2) Where is the true talent in the org? (SC: Social Network Analysis!!!!!!!)
3) Looked at other gov agencies to merge the talent
4) How to bring in people from the private sector.

+ They pay people 20% less than the private sector.
+ Bring in the retired people and have them give back (no civil service for these guys)
+ These people work well together - 0 jealousy
+ Created a new office of innovation and new technology within 1 month.
+ “We have a total monopoly on government printing - I don’t think that’s a good thing”
+ Again, they went to the private sector (Note: Discuss private sector stuff in blog entry and how it can effect libraries)
+ “Government information….we would rather the people get it from the Internet.”
+ “We needed to downsize the organization.”
+ Broad scale - “reduce all gov’t information to digital” - There will be metadata - There will be standards to do this. Character string searches. (SC: He HAS to deal with RSS)
+ “Agree with the library community as to what needs to be kept in print” (SC: Good luck with that)
+ 256,000 documents are now being digitized. (SC: My fav? Statistical Abstract of the US)

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