One Person Library

A One Person Library ( OPL ) is a library or a special library, which is managed by one person and has no immediate line manager at the supporting organization, so it is professionally put on their own. This can be a specialist ( One Professional Library) or a learned force or a layman. It covers the (not always) well-defined information needs of the organization / company and its customers or the community. They are found in both the scientific and the public library system. One person Libraries form the plurality of libraries in the world.

The librarian or the librarian a one person library must be as good as any in larger libraries usually labor completed transactions themselves do ( acquisitions, cataloging, administration, user support, information, marketing). This is to detect by the usual rules of library management hardly, therefore, one can understand the OPL approach as a separate area of library management.

These include:

  • Self-management: optimizing classification of activities, training
  • Time management and planning: effective, proactive work
  • Personnel Management: advertising, training and optimizing the use of non professional employees in the OPL ( semi-skilled, volunteers)
  • Change management: Stay up to date with respect to the professional development and implementation in its own business
  • Utility representation with respect to support the library: Lobbying, Management by Walking Around
  • Library Marketing: Promoting the services of the library, training
  • Networking: co-operation with other libraries to supplement a lack of resources by helping each other
  • Enforcing and improving pay and classification of legal disadvantages

Since this form of organization is additionally burdened with limited resources, poor pay and / or classification, there is often a desire to interact with other people in this area of ​​work and to overcome the professional isolation. This need was first recognized in the United States, where it set from the Special Libraries Association (SLA ), the OPL - motion by Guy St. Claire and Andrew Berner, two New York OPCs in transition. They founded in consequence, a company that the OPL Newsletter published, training sessions and coaching offered. In the nineties, this movement also spread to Germany.

Examples of OPL are:

  • Government Libraries
  • Libraries
  • Museum libraries
  • School Libraries
  • Corporate libraries: pharmaceutical companies, economic research institutes, research companies
  • Libraries of ( scientific) technical and research companies
  • Ecclesiastical libraries
  • Documentation centers
  • Societäten ( law firms, lawyers )
  • Patent offices
  • Children and youth libraries
School library
620803
de