Agility in libraries – the story of the Community of Practice
The Community of Practice (CoP) ”Agility in Libraries” was established in 2020 to provide a platform for exchanging ideas about agile methods in the library sector. In a short period, the group has developed into a central network for people in libraries in Germany, Austria and Switzerland who are interested in agile working. In this blog article, we take a look at the exciting story of how the community came about and its achievements to date.
Formation of the Community of Practice
The CoP ”Agility in Libraries” was founded in September 2020. It was the result of an initiative by Beat Mattmann (Lucerne Central and University Library) and myself (TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library). We both already had several years of experience with agile methods and wanted to share our passion with like-minded people in the library sector. Our goal was to create an informal platform to discuss topics such as Scrum, agile estimation and agile leadership. Although we rarely met other people in the library sector who were also involved in agility, we suspected that there must still be agile life ”out there in the wide library orbit”.
To track this down, we initially wrote emails to various library institutions and groups. However, this method proved to be cumbersome and brought little response. Beat then posted a call on X (formerly known as Twitter). To our surprise, several agile practitioners from libraries quickly got in touch and showed great interest in an exchange.
First meeting and vision of the community
The first meeting took place on September 21, 2020 and was attended by around 20 people from libraries in Germany and Switzerland. Together, we developed the vision of a CoP for agile topics in the German-speaking library sector. From then on, the CoP would meet virtually once a month to share experiences. The topics of the meetings were always to be prepared by the members of the community. In addition, we set up a Slack channel to enable the continuous discussion of current topics.
Our vision, based on a value proposition statement, was as follows:
FOR agile practitioners from all library sectors WHO want to share their experiences and gain new impulses, the CoP ”Agility in Libraries” IS a committed exchange group WHICH discusses solutions, practical examples, suggestions and experiences and thus makes them accessible to others. IN CONTRAST TO exchange groups on agility from other areas and sectors, OUR GROUP OFFERS a concrete reference to the characteristics of libraries as well as mutual encouragement and promotion of agile topics in the library sector.
The community is aimed at all library sectors, and no expert knowledge is required to participate – an interest in the topic is enough.
Organization, topics and activities
The active participation of the members helped the community to quickly gain momentum and promote the topic of agility in the library sector. Today, the community has over 300 members, its own logo, a homepage and a monthly newsletter. The organizational team consists of seven members who take on various roles in the organization, moderation and communication. The monthly virtual meetings are organized by various members from the entire community and are sometimes enriched by external guests. The topics are diverse and range from objectives and key results to retrospectives with artificial intelligence and agile transformation in libraries.
In addition to our monthly meetings, we also attend conferences and share our knowledge about agility in libraries. Since 2021, we have been regularly represented at BiblioCon, #vbib and the Swiss Library Congress. At BiblioCon, in addition to presentations, we have also organized hands-on labs where participants could get to know agile methods in a playful way and apply them in practice. These labs have been well attended in the last three years, with between 80 and 100 participants.
While agile practitioners were still exotic at BiblioCon 10 years ago, the topic is now well established. At the last BiblioCon, ”Agility in Libraries” was even given its own session with four presentations and a moderator, all of which were delivered by CoP members. The interest was so great that both the actual room and the overflow room with remote access were fully occupied.
Further information and contact
You can find more information about our monthly meetings and events on our homepage. Some of the presentations are also available on the TIB AV-Portal, including ”Scrum beyond IT“, ”Agile leadership and self-organization“ and ”Agile strategy and organizational development“ (all in German).
If you would like to attend our meetings, subscribe to the monthly newsletter or ask questions, simply use the contact form on our homepage. We look forward to your participation and sharing ideas with you!
... ist Product Owner des TIB AV-Portals // ... is product owner of the TIB AV Portal
