interview with asian development bank head of library services (lis 151)

Garcia Necesario

Valdez

Has been working in theinstitution for over two years

&

ell, we’re focused on supporting the mission on ADB. ADB’s mission is to eradicate poverty and promote

development in its member countries so our collection is focused on economic

development.”

“Usually ADB staff, but we also accept external researchers from universities

and other banks.”

“We have three teams...

“The first team is the Library team itself and they’re

responsible for management, collection development and circulation and evaluation.

“The next team is the Research team. We are not just library giving books and resources to our clients we also assist in researching some information that they need.

“The third team is the Records and Archives team. We believe that the internal records of the bank is also a source of

information.

“We are not very strict in our reporting system. I allow a lot of my personnel to

communicate directly with their clients. Other organizations are very centralized with only the team leader being the external face for the

clients, but not here.

“Here in ADB, we are more open. I allow them to communicate directly with clients. Sometimes there are problems, but I would say that those

problems are easily countered by the benefits of them directly meeting with clients.”

“I call it Enabling Leadership in an Enabling Environment. Allowing people to analyze for

themselves the situation and act on those situations with minimal supervision. I do that because all of

them are professionals. They’re well educated, and they know their work.”

?

“As a manager, I’m only supposed to provide them direction and provide them help in terms of

providing the right policy and the right resources to think.”

?

“I walk around, and I sit in front of their desk and I would chat with them. My door is open to anyone who would like to see me. I am a very

consultative type of leader.”

“If anyone has any ideas, I throw those ideas first to other members of the team and see how they feel about those ideas, because the things we do here are all related. Whatever you initiate

almost always has implications to others.”

“For me, it’s okay to be late, so long as you have a satisfactory output and have reached the

your desired goal for the period.”

“This is actually my first job. I don’t know very much about libraries. I’m not even a

librarian. But that is how the ADB library is managed all the time. What we have is not always a librarian. In fact we never had a

librarian as head of the library. “

“It is important for the head of the library to know the organization well. Because we are

not a library for its own sake. We are a library geared to support the specific goals

of the org. We need to know the requirements of the org. The [head] needs to anticipate in the future direction of the org”

“The Head needs to relate with other similar developmentarian organizations like World

Bank. They need to relate with gov’t for the need of info. So the head of the library need to have the kind of stature that can relate to

the gov’ts and the experts.”

“The head of the lib changes every now and then. Maybe after three or four years. Not necessarily coming from existing librarians. In

fact, almost always from outside. No promotions. There is a team leader, but again

not necessarily a librarian.”

et your goals. As long as you have a goal, everything would fall into place."

Leadership

end