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.