Wow - two posts in one day!! But earlier today I came across the Polite Librarian. The Blog is A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette.
They (there are two editors) have delightfully fun take on Librarians - including fashion, conference clutter, and hair and make-up tips. Apparently they feel that some of us Librarians fit the stereotype painfully well and we need to refresh our image. Here, here!!
Do you remember that awful question in job interviews or other career counseling? No, not the one about meeting the interviewer for drinks later… the one that goes “Where do you see yourself in five years or ten years?”
I’ve never had much of an answer for that question, until recently. I refer you to Dr. Haycock’s talk at SLA 2006 (my notes are below). He gave a really inspiring talk on Leadership Development. As it happened, my supervisor had insisted that I attend a Franklin-Covey workshop on the Seven Habits of Effective People the following Friday. That workshop helped me to crystallize some ideas I”d been having.
So now I’m thinking of working on an MBA and moving up my corporate ladder. I’ll have a chance to apply for a Chief Librarian position next year, but I know I don’t want to sit in that position until retirement and the only way to move up from there is to get some additional training. Hopefully I’d be able to keep the Library under me so they would benefit from someone with a Library background.
I wonder what others have done in their careers.
Today I got the latest Google Librarian Newsletter which starts out with this delicious quote.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
But as any librarian knows, the world’s information isn’t made up only of web pages. Most of it can only be found offline – on paper, in the books on the shelves at our libraries, bookstores, and homes.
Hmm - isn’t this what we’ve been telling our patrons since people went GUI??
Hopefully Google will fess up and tell the rest of the world - not just tell the Librarians what we already know!
Dale Prince gave an entertaining overview about Library 2.0 First he had to give some of us some background.
Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Publications recognized that the Internet is different from it’s original debut and he termed this new Internet Web 2.0 The new Internet is more collaborative and interactive. The older Internet then, according to Mr. O’Reilly, is Web 1.0 But then there was some interactive stuff going on before – so that must have been Web 1.5
(I wonder what that makes the early days of the Internet – maybe Mr. O’Reilly doesn’t remember Gopher and Archie sites and the years before Mosaic and Netscape and graphical interfaces. – maybe that was all just Beta. Or maybe that’s the real Web 1.0 and we’re now at Web 3.0! – dem)
Dale Prince started comparing this to some notions that we are now at Library 2.0. His overall point is that Librarians have been providing collaborative services for a long time. (Staring in Alexandria, Egypt maybe?)
I think that Dale makes a really great point. One of the reasons that the Libraries where I have worked have gotten stellar customer ratings is that Librarians are aware of the importance of serving our patrons. It is part of the training that we all received and we all do our best to deliver. It isn’t a new version of Library service – it is the pride we Librarians take in our chosen career!
Hello out there!
I am back from a really great conference. This year was only my second SLA Conference and it was even better than the one in Nashville in 2004. I found the agenda much more manageable than last time.
Another difference this time was my efforts to maintain this little blog – Library Buzz. Because of that I met several other bloggers including the Filipino Librarian – Von Tatones. By getting to know him, I met several other bloggers and generally felt better connected than last time.
It was also a great chance to see some other friends from prior conferences and to make new friends.
I felt so inspired, I offered to volunteer with the 2007 Conference in Denver!
Later today I’ll upload my notes from the informal session held by the Gay & Lesbian Issues Caucus.
Becoming a Value-Adding Information Professional
Mary Ellen Bates
www.BatesInfo.com
(Amanda Kindle – moderator)
What we’ll cover:
What’s a value-added info pro? It is someone who provides answers, not just information. A data dump isn’t enough. We don’t let things look like search results – we clean it up.
This sometimes goes against our grain (and training) to “just present the facts, ma’amâ€
Different Mindset
Develop resources, skills and tools for additional high-end research:
Primary research
Information topography analysis (information about information) – where I found the answer or what I learned about the information, who’s writing about it or who’s talking about it.
Data analysis
Provide research services directly to you organization’s clients
Acknowledge that they are doing great research themselves these are ways that we can help them do more.
Be sure you know not only what your client wants, but why and in what context
Does this client need an dvalue lots of text?
• Charts, graphs, spreadsheets?
• Bullet points?
• Color or black/white?
Understand how your clients acquire and use information
• What other information do they use? Do they like Powerpoint?
• What does it look like? Does it have an executive summary?
• How distilled is it? Do they want the underlying articles?
How can you make your deliverables plug-and-play? The requestor is asking for the information for some reason – find out what they are going to do with the information.
Examine how you appear to your clients
Are you as user-friendly as a search engine?
No added value = no perceived value
Fee-based services
Use the special output features of the online services
Lots of Dialog features. – defined output, webcharts, rtf, xml output
The most valuable resource that you use each day is your time.
Tips and strategies – adding value to web content
Look for “information-dense†sources
Charts, graphs, tables, analysis – limit your search to pdf or xcl formats
Look for sources your client doesn’t have (or know about)
Telephone research, public records, invisible web content, podcasts, wikis encyclopedias – think of sources that won’t show up in traditional web searches.
www.Podscope.com has speech recognition of podcasts.
Use BlogPulse’s Trendsearch to demonstrate change in blogging over time
www.blogpulse.com/trend
When was a term used or how much use of the term was there over time?
Google Trends watches search word trends over time
www.google.com/trends
also maps news articles on these topics; explains why
Factiva has a similar charting of use of search terms to know when a term was heavily used.
See the My[search engine] features to create annotated bibliographies
Myweb2.search.yahoo.com
www.google.com/searchistory
mystuff.ask.com
a9.com
furl.net offers a similar service, using its Export feature. A social bookmarking service like delicio.us export to a website – the latest bibliography of websites.
Highlight the good stuff
Extract the good stuff
From both web sites and published material
Use Excel to generate charts and graphs
Always write cover memo, table of contents, executive summary – make the data look as friendly to the requestor as possible.
Brand everything
Seal it in PDF file
Use a distinctive cover: “Oh, it’s a report from the Research Center!â€
Have a graphic designer produce a format and logo
Look at the formatting of market research reports for ideas
I got some good ideas from Guideline’s (formerly Find/SVP’s) sample deliverables. How do they make the deliverable look attractive.
A few tools
Shorten URLs with snurl.com or digbig.com
Copernic summarizer – a useful tool to start the analysis/synthesis process
NewsBlaster – still in beta, but an interesting tool for summarization – not yet available to the public
www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/
Dialog has a workshop on adding value
Quantum.dialog.com/training/workshops/addingvalue/
See Dialog’s “Successful Searching†documentation for report and User-defined output
Support.dialog.com/searchaids/success
Greetings from SLA all! today I had an exciting day. First I went to a Business & Finance Division.
Then I was off to a Leadership Development talk by Ken Haycock. There’s a separate post for that. At the end of the talk I met the Filipino Librarian - Von Totanes.
Von told me about a secret gathering of bloggers at lunchtime. I visited and met some really great Librarians!!
I’ll post more later.
having a great time at SLA!!
- David
Ken Haycock, Professor & Director, School of Library and Information Science, San Jose University.
The developing leader has to want to develop. Many people don’t want to step up to the leadership role and the jobs are going to people outside the profession.
Talk around the topic and annoy the concrete sequentialists!
Key component – acceptance of ambiguity.
Leadership isn’t just about supervising staff. There’s more to it than that.
Management and leadership: are they different? How?
Managers do things right, leaders do the right thing.
Leaders motivate people and move things along toward the end goal. Over 200 definitions – pick one you like.
Think of a leader whom you admire. Do you respect him or her?
Leaders tend to hire people who are better than they are. They are self-confident enough to not be threatened.
Great leaders rally people to a better future.
Why do we want to empower all the staff – we should enable them to do better the things that they were hired to do. We should align people toward the goal we have.
Four competencies:
Leadership tasks – we don’t have to be sick in order to get better. There isn’t a deficiency – but we improve from a good level of leadership to a better level.
Envisioning goals – knowing where we want to go so we can work toward them.
Leadership skills:
Leadership Attributes:
Are leaders born or can they be developed?
Mentoring is important! Can be informal as well as formal. When networking we look for mentors. As we change jobs or move up the ladder, we look for new mentors to help us in our new roles.
We have to make our own opportunities for development.
All people need the following in order to be successful:
“Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly.†- Mae West
Only you can define your measures of personal success.. but.. to make the greatest possible impact over the longest time.
Discover what you don’t like doing and stop doing it
Myers-Briggs type indicators
Now, discover your strengths – Donald Clifton and Marcus Buckingham
We tend to hire our own type even when we don’t know our own type or the other people’s types. Sometimes we should be hiring a complementary type.
Most of us are unable to articulate our strengths. What strengths do we bring to a position.
Other dimensions: the human equation
Pfeifer: successful organizations
Employment security
Selective hiring (costs more to let someone go than to hire)
Decentralization: self-managed Teams
High compensation contingent on performance
Extensive training
Reduced status distinctions
Sharing of financial and performance information throughout the organization
Leadership tendencies
My Myers-Briggs
My leadership strengths are…
My potential pitfalls are..
My suggestions for my own development are..
The implications for my team may be?
Observations:
Developing the profile
Promoting the organization and community
Predictors of success - resumes are not good predictors, job trials are better. What accomplishments in the last five years? Who can confirm that?
Separating the leaders I
Separating the leaders II
What do you want this person to achieve
What competencies does the person need?
What barriers to success exist?
How would you determine what success is?
Advocacy lessons
- something that has to be done again and again
Logical incrementalism
Respect
Deposits and withdrawals – lobbying and networking is like banking – we have to make deposits before we can make withdrawals.
Connecting agendas – what do you want to accomplish in the next two years and how can I help you achieve them.
San Jose Advantage – MLIS training
Based on the MBA model of teamwork
http://slisweb.sjsu.edu
develop strong and healthy communities
add value as community leaders with a clearly defined nicheare market-driven, customer-focused, at the table
the 5 “f’sâ€:
What kind of leader?
What kind of relationships?
What kind of impact?
What kind of difference?
Next steps:
Know yourself
Take the opportunities
Select a mentor
Discuss succession management
khaycock@slis.sjsu.edu