Managing IT/Community Partnerships in the 21st Century

Citation

Calvert, P. (2003), "Managing IT/Community Partnerships in the 21st Century", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 213-214. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310481472

Partnerships can be loosely defined as a joint effort between two parties, with each party providing specific products or services towards a common, mutually beneficial goal. In this book Lazar, of Towson University in New Jersey, has concentrated on partnerships involving academic departments of information technology. He uses the term “information technology” (IT) to cover information systems, MIS, information science and so on. Although the emphasis is clearly on using IT, there is relevant content here for academic departments of library science, and also for librarians who might wish to understand the benefits of partnerships with an academic organisation.

The book is divided into four major themes:

1. 1.

   (1) course partnerships, interpreted as service‐learning in the curriculum;

2. 2.

   (2) educational partnerships, using two quite different cases of researchers working on practical systems design;

3. 3.

   (3) business partnerships, mainly focusing on the use of industry knowledge to improve community participation in educational programmes; and

4. 4.

   (4) finally digital divide issues, such as providing access in low income areas.

There are 13 chapters built around these themes, which Lazar calls a sampling of the different types of partnerships taking place between communities and academic IT departments. There is, indeed, a wide range of partnerships covered, but it is disappointing that of the 13 only two come from outside the USA – one from Australia and one from the UK (though sometimes the community partner lies outside the West).

It is disappointing on several counts to note that there seems to be no mention of libraries. First, academic departments engaged in partnerships really ought to know better than assume that IT is the answer to all needs, and in almost all cases described in this book there is a crying need for a librarian to help organise information or a library to provide the information resources. Second, the central focus on IT means that information management has not been given enough attention; an example from New Zealand is an academic information management team working with a regional tourist industry to help increase efficiency, though it is fair to say that Lazar would need another book to cover all possible partnerships. Last, there is huge scope for librarians to seek partnerships with academic departments to improve service delivery.

What so often seems to be missing from discussions of partnerships is any sort of generalisable context that one might call theory. Only one chapter of this volume overtly discusses theory, but at least that is one more than we usually find. LeRouge and Webb use Advanced Structuration Theory (AST) to examine industry/academic collaboration that involves advanced information technologies (AITs), and in some ways this is the best chapter in the book.

This is an attractive book, albeit priced so that only institutions will buy it, with a short and rather simple cumulated index. As there are not many titles in this area, this is one that academic libraries should purchase.