Library Buzz

Greetings one and all and Happy New Year!

There hasn’t been much for me to report in terms of the career buzz for me of late - but there is now. For the past 5+ years I have worked at a bureau of the Department of the Treasury as a Reference Librarian. The work has been interesting and the patrons/customers very nice. For the past two years the working environment has been incredibly bad with some real personal low points.

But we move on — I have accepted a new position as Electronic Resources Librarian with another federal agency. I had a wonderful interview there a couple of weeks ago and met the Library staff. Everyone was genuinely friendly and professional. The library itself is very nice and the agency offers good benefits including a dining room with a view of the Mall and the monuments of DC.

What a great way to start the new year - well, what a great way to start the month of February!

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SLA announced the results of the membership vote on the name change. I am pleased to see they did report the actual vote count and they also reported that only 50% of those elegible even voted.

Now I am wondering why 50% didn’t vote - either they didn’t care which way the vote went or they were convinced that their vote wouldn’t matter - regardless of how the vote went. My feeling is to always vote - because at some point my one vote may make the differerence about something I really care about.

SLA Name Will Stay: Alignment of Association to Continue

Alexandria, Virginia, December 10, 2009- The Special Libraries Association (SLA) announced the results of its association-wide vote on a new name today. Voting in record numbers, SLA members failed to approve a proposal to change the organization’s name to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals. 50 percent of those members eligible to vote participated in the referendum, with 2071 voting yes and 3225 voting no.

“The active discussions, online and in local meetings, are a testament to the passion and commitment that knowledge and information professionals feel towards their association and their profession,” said Gloria Zamora, SLA 2009 President. “This level of engagement will help make SLA and its members more effective advocates for the information profession in the years ahead.”

The name change proposal stemmed from the findings of the Alignment Project, an intensive two-year research effort aimed at understanding the value of the information and knowledge professional in today’s marketplace and how to best communicate that value. “Our name will remain,” Zamora continued, “but we will go forward with developing opportunities for our members to use the Alignment findings to demonstrate their contributions to the organizations that employ them.”

“Information and knowledge professionals are critical assets to the organizations that employ them, yet their contributions and capabilities are too often underestimated,” said SLA CEO Janice R. Lachance. “The findings of the Alignment Project research will guide SLA in developing services and programs that will more successfully position these professionals in the marketplace and attract the recognition and compensation they deserve.”

About SLA
The Special Libraries Association (SLA) is a nonprofit global organization for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners. SLA serves about 11,000 members in 75 countries in the information profession, including corporate, academic, and government information specialists. SLA promotes and strengthens its members through learning, advocacy, and networking initiatives. For more information, visit us on the Web at www.sla.org.

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Wow - has it really been almost 2 months since my last post?

Tomorrow SLA will announce the outcome of the month-long voting on the name change. I’m curious what it will be. I’m guessing that they will only announce the numbers if the the vote is strongly in support of ASKP. If it is close either way the vote count will only frustrate the losing side. If the vote is strongly to keep the name SLA, then the board will look foolish to have invested so much capital into the process only to have it rejected by their members.

In the meantime I have made friends with fellow who is new in DC and plays in my band. He’s an attorney and is starting at Catholic University School of Library and Information Science in January.

Great guy - we went to the Holiday party for the DC SLA Chapter held on December 3 at the Woman’s National Democratic Club. Had fun, I won a shirt, nice dinner, open bar courtesy of Leadership Directories, and a goodie bag!! Good networking too - I was at the rowdy table in the back!

So much fun I may go next year! Also met the president of the Law Librarians’ Society of DC. So maybe I’ll be joining that group as well.

So many things to do!!!!

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The other day I posted this to my Facebook account -

Hi to all my Facebook friends!

I belong to an organization that is planning to change its name after 100 years. I want to get folks’ reactions to the proposed name. The idea is to have a name that reflects better who we are and what we do.

Caveat - don’t read other people’s comments until after you write your thoughts.

The proposed new name is - Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals

The acronym would be - ASK-Pro

I got some interesting comments:

• I like ASKPro as all one word. You can differentiate the two works with different colors of font or one bold and one not…but I like it. It would stick in your head.
• The absolutely essential, non-optional hyphen is missing. The grammatical ambiguity is inexcusable for an organization assembling brain power together. Worse, I have a hard time believing, as the acronym’s hyphen implies, that it’s an association for knowledge professionals who are strategic about their work.
• The name is not specific enough as to indicate the nature of the group (this is w/out reading other comments and knowing only your career in Library work) –”Strategic Knowledge Professionals” — toooooo much spin. Keep it Simple
• ASKPro , I like and understand,, if that is your question??
• Sucky. I don’t like it. I think the “knowledge” part is presumptious. BTW, I just rejoined SLA and now they do this! It just sounds like a marketing firm to me.
• actually it sounds way too much like the KMPro association in the USA. ALso, to be quite honest many information professionals do not get the ‘knowledge’ side of their duties - it feels like false advertising - also what do we do with the Km Division if it is renamed???
• Sounds like a marketing company, sorry — and a bad one. The word strategic is way too jargony. Stick with knowledge professionals, IMHO.
• I don’t understand the “Strategic” part of the title.

I think I get the SLA Alignment Project, but I’m not really too crazy about the proposed name. They are putting it to a vote and the idea is that the new name will reflect who we are as Librarians and Information Professionals and what we do.

My bet is that we’d still have to explain what the group is.

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Sept 2009 Information Outlook Cover

I am always happy to see the Information Outlook come to my home. There are always some excellent articles. This month I was delighted to see my friend Von Totanes in the group photo on the cover. Also it was taken in DC during the 2009 SLA Conference in front of the former DC Public Library - a Carnegie library!

Von has quite a reputation worldwide as the Filipino Librarian. On his blog he talks about many things in the Librarian community as well as topics focused on libraries in the Philippines.

Congrats to the other cover-librarians as well!

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Greetings all - it has been a long time and there are many reasons for that.

It has been a challenging summer - busy and frustrating. Thank goodness for friends and other supporters.

To begin with - Cheers to a friend and former colleague at the FDIC Library who retired in June. Noreen Lewis was always friendly and helpful when I first started there 26 years ago. She trained me on many duties and alerted me to any problems. She was always at work early in the morning when things were quiet. Noreen is a somewhat typical librarian in that she is quiet and a little shy. But there was never any doubt that she knew her job!

When I returned to the FDIC Library as a Cataloger she reviewed my work until she was satisfied that I knew what I was doing and that the integrity of the collection was not going to suffer because of my carelessness or lack of diligence. I sort of enjoyed cataloging - though it is a bit mind-numbing. My congrats to all those Catalogers who do their jobs well.

At one point in her career Noreen was diagnosed with cancer and had to suffer through surgery and chemo and radiation. She was able to work from home and she was every bit as productive then as the days she came in to work. Noreen has a quiet sense of humor and is able to laugh - and that is a good quality in everyone. Noreen didn’t play the tragic victim of cancer, but she didn’t laugh that ordeal off. Once I asked if there was anything I could do. She asked if I could get the radiation for her - because it hurts - like a sunburn and then you have to go back again, and again, again. “ouch,” I said.

I wish Noreen a long, happy and healthy retirement! Thank you for being so patient with me all those years ago.

Confluence and Serendipity

In the past month or so I have been getting signals - subtle and direct - that have encouraged me to focus more positively on my life and work goals.

My sister, Teresa, has talked about a book titled The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. It is a new age, self-help book and it has some pretty good, common sense ideas about life in general.

My partner was talking about positive and negative energies and I asked him about that. He said you always want to focus on positive energies. If someone doesn’t have anything positive to come out - that’s not your problem - but you don’t want to focus on negative energies.

And I take all that and look it in terms of my own set of beliefs and call on the power of prayer. I focus my energies and say a prayer to my guardian angel as well as to those of others and call on good things for them and me and good things from this encounter.

This is great - and I’m feeling better and things are going better professionally. Yea! I was looking through the latest Information Outlook from SLA and there’s a really good article by Marshall Brown titled - Getting What You Want to Come to You. (You may need to be a member of SLA in order to read the article.)

In the article Mr. Brown talks about much of the same thing - keep a positive perspective. He talks about two workers - one who works with ease and is successful, the other who labors hard with barely adequate results. The first is floating on the river, the second is slogging through the mud. What’s the difference?

Hint: It”s in the river image. When Paul works hard, it doesn”t feel like a struggle–he”s “in the flow.” He”s in tune with his life purpose, his passions, and his vision for himself and the work he does in the world. As a consequence, he”s just naturally able to attract what he wants, with enviable ease.

Read the article - it is good. I will continue to approach my life and my career in a positive manner. It is always a shame that we have to struggle sometimes in order to appreciate things. The important thing is to learn the lesson and keep thinking positive. Interesting how all this came about at once - and I started re-reading some Joseph Campbell too.

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One topic at last month’s SLA Conference that got some mention from the podium was Align in 09.

I will admit that I didn’t pay too much attention to it until there was a comment made about changing the name of our organization. Initially the name of the organization was Special Libraries Association. A few years ago they opted to make our name SLA - an intialism that stands for nothing. That was an odd move to say the least.

Now the organization has tapped folks from all levels whom they term true believers in the Alignment Project to reach out and promote the project. Go therefore unto all nations, making disciples… So the proselytizing begins.

Do I sound cynical? I actually raised the question to one of the SLA Caucus Listservs that I belong to and there’s been quite a bit of traffic and comment on the topic.

So - I should clarify, now that I understand. The alignment is about a name for the organization that better reflects the diversity of librarians, researchers, and information professionals of all types (database management, software and hardware types too). It is about dictating that individuals cannot continue to call themselves a librarian if that is how they identify.

One of the goals is to help us better articulate our value to our organizations and our patrons and align our work with the needs of our patrons. In some cases that means using different terms to describe what we do. And maybe getting better salaries and funding along the way.

I have started reading a book by Ruth Kneale titled You Don’t Look Like a Librarian. She opens by discussing the myriad job titles of the librarians that she knows. She also compares salaries of librarians and other jobs that perform similar types of duties that librarians perform - database management, webmaster and others.

Then there’s this to consider.

From Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, 1594:

JULIET:

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

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Knowledge Management Roundtable: What’s New in KM?
SLA 2009 Conference
Monday, 15 June 2009 7:00AM - 9:00AM

KM Vision and Strategy
KM reporting lines -

• IT Department
• Library
• HR Department (Learning/Training Centers)

The logical development is still data – information – knowledge – wisdom

Folks are sensing a new environment for KM in communication.

In the past KM was static – building a database that did not get used.
With Web 2.0 tools (social networks, inter-activity) KM has become more dynamic.

KM in other countries:

• US – IT focus
• UK – HR focus
• Australia – somewhere in between the two

KM is what is in your head and that is hard to capture in a database. One person mentioned the 30% Rule – Most people can only tell about 30% of what they know and can only write about 30% of what the say. In other words, we know more than we can say and we can say more than we can write. So, a database will never capture everything.

A KM worker at Harvard Medical says that KM there is in Patient Education and always has been.

Another company has KM in their HR Department because HR has a mandate for organizational excellence. KM is about a culture of sharing resources and they begin with new hires.

KM Worst Practices – programs that were tried and were not effective

Write a KM strategy, shelve it and forget about it.
Another KM effort ignored the corporate engagement part. You need to get buy-in from top to bottom.

Other people said that they provided rewards and recognition for people to participate in resource sharing (KM).

KM is generally viewed by most staff as an added step to their work. Web 2.0 tools provide an opportunity to make KM resource sharing part of the social networking that they are already doing. Many folks report their projects etc. on Twitter and Facebook, so something like that might be able to capture KM in the future.

The Roundtable was sponsored by the SLA Knowledge Management Division.

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Why Corporate Governance Matters
Financial Institutions Roundtable Speaker
Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Nell Minnow, President
Corporate Library

A little bit about libraries:

Nell opened by saying how much she has always loved libraries. And her sister is a librarian, Mary Minnow who also has a law degree and runs the LibraryLaw Blog

The Corporate Library is dedicated to research and analysis, finding the right information. That is why they chose the name of the company.

Corporate Governance:

Companies are hiding information in plain sight. They provide data on pay for their officers and directors, but they don’t necessarily reveal the salaries of the highest paid individuals.

TARP companies cannot offer bonuses so they adjust the salaries of their CEOs and other officers. These adjustments are always sizeable increases.

CEO contracts are part of the SEC filings (10K filings) and they are public. But some companies play games with filing them e.g. submitted after filing a Proxy statement so that shareholders don’t necessarily see them.

Nell mentioned a website – www.footnoted.org as a good resource on tracking compensation and benefits offered at various companies.

In addition to the Golden Parachutes that many executives have had – huge dividends awarded even as their companies failed – there are new options sometimes referred to as bullet-proof options or spring-loaded options.

Shareholders should be looking at what benchmarks are in place for measuring the effectiveness of the CEO.

The Corporate Library rates companies for the way the handle their CEOs. They look at contracts and benefits. If it looks as though the board of directors is unable to stand up to the CEO that is a bad reflection on the company. AIG, Countrywide, Enron were among many that Corporate Library rated badly.

One element that the Corporate Library looks at is how the company responds to shareholders’ proposals. One company had proposals from a 60% block of shareholders and the CEO was dismissing the proposal. Perhaps the proposal doesn’t have business merit, but the CEO should not be ignoring 60% of the shareholders. Would they ignore 60% of their customers?

Currently the SEC is proposing rules to allow shareholders to propose actual directors rather than just voting on a slate that has been proposed.

Other resources that Nell mentioned to find out company practices:

Shareowner Education Network

Motley Fool discussion boards

Yahoo message boards

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Competitive Intelligence and the Government Librarian
SLA 2009
Tuesday, 16 Jun 2009
9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

This was a very informative session given by Roberta Shaffer, Director of FLICC/Fedlink.

Competitive Intelligence is a process used to gather data – same as what librarians have called Information Analytics.

CI is morphing into business intelligence or in the government – strategic intelligence.

Self-knowledge is needed in order to give us a good perspective before we look outward to competitors within the industry.

90% of our CI comes from open sources.

Roberta talked about collecting a mosaic of data because there will still be spaces between the data.

CI leads to a measurable competitive advantage.

Librarians use trusted sources – CI often uses soft sources – rumors, gossip, op-eds, customer feedback etc.

Librarians need to take ownership of Web 2.0 tools – they are of great value when collecting CI – they are soft sources.

Use of gray literature is important.

Both Library Science and CI take an active approach to information. We anticipate the needs of our users.

We are guilty of having a favorite trend or resource. It is okay to use our favorite – but we have to be open to other resources and other data point to follow.

Roberta says that she follows the drugs approved by the FDA and the illnesses and conditions that they address. Other people look at housing starts or the barrel price of oil as a data point to watch and observe a trend.

Library Science and CI use the same resources and they data intensive.

How is CI used?

• To validate or change a business model
• To create networks, alliances and partnerships
• To evaluate core processes (budgeting, accounting, billing, hiring)
• To pursue R&D (skunk works, M&A, Tech Transfer [very important in gov’t])
• To analyze production systems or workflows
• To prioritize clientele
• To deploy delivery and communications channels
• To enhance customer experience
• To secure brand

Standard techniques in CI analysis:
Framing – how the organization fits in with competitors, industry, etc.

• SWOT: smaller org
• PEST: Political, Economic, Social, Technology
• PEST/LE: above plus Legal and Environmental
• STEEPLED: Social, technology, education, economics, politics, legal, environment, and demographics

Scanning - identify the external factors
STEP: Strategic Trend Evaluation Process
Wireless devices used in industry for tickets etc.

Forecasting - consider a range of future possibilities – not really a librarian activity, usually up to economists and sociologists

• short-term
• transitional
• long-term

Envisioning - select a vision for organization and give it a time frame

Strategic Plan pathway to the vision – tends to be the MBAs area

Business Plan

Emerging Leadership in the 21st Century

• Finland - education innovation – no majors, study based on problem-solving
• Philippines - workforce/work ethic – most productive country
• Korea – most industry is vertical so they own the whole process
• Nigeria – portal between Africa and her raw materials and Europe and US
• Netherlands – a very open society – look at acceptance of gay marriage as a bellwether of openness. Open is good for business, it attracts employees.
• Norway - citizen-empowered government, legislature asks citizenry for input. (but Norway doesn’t have much immigration and is an homogeneous society).
• Brazil – one of the BRIC countries looking to develop a new world currency (other countries are Russia, India and China). Brazil had oil reserves, arable land, leading exporter of soy, oil, minerals, wine production, etc.

Roberta mentioned that David Walker, the former Comptroller General (head of the GAO) said that we need to change the business model for the US government to one of crisis management. Let the states or regional groups of states conduct the other business of running the country.

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