158   INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES  |  DECEMBER 2009

Michelle FrisquePresident’s Message

I 
know the President’s Message is usually dedicated 
to talking about where LITA is now or where we are 
hoping LITA will be in the future, but I would like to 

deviate from the usual path. The theme of this issue of 
ITAL is “Discovery,” and I thought I would participate in 
that theme. 

Like all of you, I wear many hats. I am president of 
LITA. I am head of the Information Services Department 
at the Galter Health Sciences Library at Northwestern 
University. I also am a new part-time student in the 
Masters of Learning and Organizational Change pro-
gram at Northwestern University. 

As a student and a practicing librarian, I am now 
on both sides of the discovery process. As head of the 
Information Systems Department, I lead the team that 
is responsible for developing and maintaining a web-
site that assists our health-care clinicians, researchers, 
students, and staff with selecting and managing the 
electronic information they need when they need it. As a 
student, I am a user of a library discovery system. 

In a recent class, we were learning about the Burke-
Litwin Causal Model of Organization Performance and 
Change. The article we were reading described the 
model; however, it did not answer all of my questions. I 
thought about my options and decided I should investi-
gate further. 

Before I continue, I should confess that, like many stu-
dents, I was working on this homework assignment at the 
last minute, so the resources had to be available online. 
This should be easy, right?

I wanted to find an overview of the model. I first tried 
the library’s website using several search strategies and 
browsed the resources in Metalib, the library catalog, and 
LibGuides with no luck. The information I found was not 
what I was looking for. I then tried Wikipedia without 
success. Finally, as a last resort, I searched Google. I fig-
ured I would find something there, right? I didn’t. While 
I found many scholarly articles and sites that would 
give me more information for a fee, none of the results I 
reviewed gave me an overview of the model in question. 
I gave up.

The student in me thought: It should not be this hard! The 
librarian in me just wanted to forget I had ever had this 
experience. This got me to thinking: Why is this so hard? 

Libraries have “stuff” everywhere. We access “stuff,” like 
books, journals, articles, images, datasets, etc., from hun-
dreds of vendors and thousands of publishers who guard 
their stuff and dictate how we and our users can access 
that stuff. That’s a problem. I could come up with a million 
other reasons why this is so difficult, but I won’t. Instead, I 
would like to think about what could be.

In this same class we learned about Appreciative 
Inquiry (AI) theory. I am simplifying the theory, but the 
essence of AI is to think about what you want something 
to be instead of identifying the problems of what is.

I decided to put AI to the test and tried to come up 
with my ideal discovery process. I put both my student 
and librarian hats on, and here is what I have come up 
with so far:

 n I want to enter my search in one place and search 
once for what I need. I don’t want to have to search 
the same terms many times in various locations in 
the hopes one of them has what I am looking for. 
I don’t care where the stuff is or who provides the 
information. If I am allowed to access it I want to 
search it. 

 n I want items to be recommended to me on the basis 
of what I am searching. I also want the system to 
recommend other searches I might want to try. 

 n I want the search results to be organized for me. 
While perusing a result list can be loads of fun 
because you never know what you might find, I 
don’t always have time to go through pages and 
pages of information. 

 n I want the search results to be returned to me in a 
timely manner.

 n I want the system to learn from me and others so 
that the results list improves over time.

 n I want to find the answer.

I’m sure if I had time I would come up with more. 
While we aren’t there yet, we should continually take 
steps—both big and small—to perfect the discovery pro-
cess. I look forward to reading the articles in this issue 
to see what other librarians have discovered, and I hope 
to learn new things that will bring us one step closer to 
creating the ultimate discovery experience.

Michelle Frisque (mfrisque@northwestern.edu) is LITA 
President 2009–10 and Head, Information Systems, North-
western University, Chicago.