Joy Banks, Florida & Caribbean Chapter, Museums, Arts & Humanities and Solo Librarians Divisions

I recently started working as a solo librarian in a collection closed to just about everyone. As I have been thinking about being future ready, I find myself overwhelmed. My supervisor doesn’t own a cell phone, I only own a stupid phone (that’s the opposite of a smart phone, right?), and the audience I serve is not real big on technology. So how do I move all of us into this future?

Answer: baby steps. I start by maximizing our online presence. Since we are so small, I am seeking collaborative opportunities outside my institution to push our collection out to as many places as possible, shepherding my users back to the library. I want to meet my users where they are, slowly drawing them into digitization (they like paper), email (they like phone calls), and social media (social what?). If I take a huge leap into the future, ignoring the fact that they may need to take quite a few more steps to reach where I am now, I will lose them and the value that my collection can hold.

Being future ready cannot possibly mean the same thing to all people. Or perhaps it does, but we will each reach this future in our own way. No one process will be adequate to meet the needs of every institution. As a profession, we also need to recognize that the digital divide does not just impact our audience; it also influences the way that institutions are able to implement “future ready” ideas. I want to lead my users into the future on a path they (and I) can follow and take their hands when it seems they may be losing their way.

Joy Banks is the Librarian at the Anton Brees Carillon Library at Bok Tower Gardens and arguably has one of the best office views in central Florida. She is enjoying her new adventures in the world of music libraries after serving just over four years as the cataloger in an academic institution. She earned her MSLS from Clarion University of Pennsylvania where she was an active member of the SLA student chapter. Currently, she is serving as the President-Elect and First Five Years Ambassador for the SLA Florida & Caribbean Chapter.

Michael Bellacosa, Fairfield County Chapter [immediate past-president], Museums, Arts and Humanities Division

Since my LIS career is just beginning after a radical professional transition, I am completely focused on moving into the future with all the change which that entails. Fortunately, my 18-year prior career as a trader, risk manager and business manager on Wall Street taught me many things about working in rapidly evolving and innovating environments: most importantly, either you plunge in to lead or you surf the wave or you get left behind [with a life preserver if you’re lucky].

As a newly-minted librarian, I have few preconceived notions about the profession: indeed, while I still like the term “librarian”, I have a very expansive view of the meaning of that word as well as the word “library”. Because my best strategy for breaking into this new field is to leverage my substantial [yet strictly speaking unrelated] resume, I am imagining the analogies between what I did before my MLS degree [completed last December] and what I can do now.

One trail I’ve been following is the relationship between managing the risk to portfolios of financial assets [i.e. hedging] and managing the risk to collections of digital assets [i.e. digital preservation]. I think the analogies can be generalized to physical and hybrid physical/digital collections. Further, many of the same risk management principles can also be applied to the digitization process itself. From this launching point, I’m working to invent a model for LIS professionals to use in making cost-benefit/risk-management business case arguments to non-LIS administrators in charge of the resources for funding such programs.

If I succeed at translating my skills and experience from the finance-world to the info-world and apply these to current and upcoming challenges in the LIS field, then I will have become “future ready”.

Michael Bellacosa completed his MLS in December 2010. Before commencing that program, he was a currency trader and a risk manager on Wall Street for nearly 20 years. His primary interests are in digital preservation, challenges from technological obsolescence, and the effective use of current information and communication technologies for preserving and providing access to special collections.  Michael presented the basic outline of his model at the “Contributed Papers” session on June 14 at 10am. Check SLA’s Web site for his handout.

Jonathan Leff, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Academic and Museums, Arts & Humanities Divisions

I recently read a FutureReady 365 blog post by Chelle Batchelor titled “The Future Ready Job Search,” in which she highlighted four elements of a successful job search: Community, Collaboration, Flexibility and Adaptability. I feel that these four elements are key to anyone working in the information field of the future.

Earlier this year, the SLA San Francisco Bay Region Chapter began a project to archive all the copies of its Bayline newsletter, which began in 1929. As a newly minted information professional, I jumped at the chance to contribute my skills to the organization, learn new skills, and to network with other info pros in my area. In our first meeting to assess the situation, we decided to look at the actual physical archives (located in the basement of a building in UC Berkeley), and then begin the process of indexing all of the Bayline issues up to the present day, with the goal of eventually being able to digitize all the issues that currently exist only in print form, so as to make them available for future generations.

What do bound volumes of newsletters from the Hoover administration have to do with being future ready? To me, being future ready is all about using the latest technological tools for dissemination of information to retrieve the past from remote cellars and bring it into the light of day where it can be accessed by all who wish to view it. While our eventual goal of digitization may be a ways off, we are still able to use online collaboration tools to give everyone a virtual common space in which we can share information and ideas about the project.

Two key traits that current and future information professionals must possess are flexibility and adaptability. In order to be able to deliver information to a client – or even to share it with collaborators – an information professional needs to know which are the appropriate tools for the job at hand out of the many tools he or she has at his or her disposal.

At our first project meeting, someone mentioned PBworks as a good platform for shared collaboration, and I volunteered to create a PBworks space for our project. I took the time to set up pages that I thought would be relevant to the project, including an instruction page to guide members to the site, after which I notified everyone that they now had access to the site. Soon, members of my group informed me that PBworks didn’t do what we wanted it to do, namely allow people to view each other’s work and collaborate simultaneously on documents. I realized that Google Docs would allow us to do this, and readily switched to it from PBworks and agreed to be the point person for any people who may have been unfamiliar with it.

In a sense, the other members of my group were also users, and as the person who set up the shared workspaces, it was my job to respond to their needs and provide them with the right tools so that everyone could easily access information about our project, and therefore be able to collaborate. It would not have done for me to say “my way or the highway” and insist that everyone use a platform that was not appropriate for the job. If I had done so, I would most likely have found myself off the project.

Information professionals do this every day. We assess the needs of our users in a wide array of situations where people need to have easy and efficient access to information to make informed decisions or to collaborate on group efforts. Through our possession of diverse tools and skills that can be brought into any situation requiring organization of information for easy accessibility, we are uniquely poised to contribute to the collective intelligence of the communities we serve.

Jonathan Leff is a recent graduate of San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science. He is particularly interested in the way people use information and the interplay between information and technology. He can be reached at jleff@comcast.net.

By David Shumaker, Washington, DC Chapter, Academic, Education, Knowledge Management, Leadership & Management Divisions

Once upon a time, there was a young information services manager named Dave* who heard about embedded librarianship and decided to put it into practice. To begin, he embarked on a campaign to raise information and knowledge services’ visibility at the executive level of the corporation where he was working. He made appointments to go around and brief the executive councils at each of the major operating units of the company. He planned to show them how valuable library services were already, and how the librarians were planning to do even better with embedded librarianship. Starting with a unit led by a senior vice president /general manager he had already worked with, he prepared a briefing all about the value of the librarians’ work, what they were doing and what their plans were. After listening to his presentation, the senior vp turned to him and said, “Dave, what do you need from us?” It was a question he actually wasn’t prepared for. He had thought only in terms of what he and his team had to offer – not about what they needed from senior management.

Fortunately, he recovered, and he and his team went on to implement embedded librarianship and expand their value to the corporation, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Moral: SLA-funded research indicates that senior management engagement is one of the key attributes of successful embedded librarianship initiatives. When you’re preparing your elevator speech or your presentation about your value, also think about what senior management can do to help you be successful. Whether it’s funding, space, support for continuing education, visible communication, assigning mentors to new librarians, constructive feedback – ask for what you need!

*Name not changed to protect the guilty.

For details about embedded librarianship, see the SLA research report at http://www.sla.org/pdfs/EmbeddedLibrarianshipFinalRptRev.pdf , Information Outlook Jan-Feb 2010, or the embedded librarian blog at http://embeddedlibrarian.wordpress.com.

David Shumaker has served as Clinical Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information
Science, Catholic University of America, since August 2006. Dave’s teaching interests include the present and future roles of librarians in society, the management of libraries and information services, marketing, information systems, and library public services. His research and writing explore the changing roles of librarians in organizations of all types. He and his co-investigator, Mary Talley, were awarded the 2007 Special Libraries Association Research Grant for their project, “Models of Embedded Librarianship.” The final report of the project is available on the SLA website, and related articles have been published in Library Journal, Reference & User Services Quarterly, and Information Outlook. Dave is a frequent speaker and panelist on embedded librarianship. Follow his blog at http://embeddedlibrarian.wordpress.com.

by Michelle Manafy

There is certainly a sense that “kids today” read less and that they have short attention spans. However, technology has actually triggered an explosion of media usage among young people in the last five years – so much so that young people spend about 7 1/2 hours a day consuming media, according to a study of 8- to 18-year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And, while Kaiser reports that print is the only category of media consumption to lose ground among young people, within the print category only newspapers and magazines declined. Book reading held steady over the previous five years and even increased by a few minutes a day over the last decade. (Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds).

Yet despite their content consumption, young people today can be baffling when it comes to understanding how to engage them in your content products and services as they are also notoriously brand-fickle and their attention — while not at all limited in its span — is fractured among multiple delivery devices (often at the same time).

In my work on the book Dancing With Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation That’s Transforming the Way Business Is Done (May 2011, CyberageBooks, http://bit.ly/DwDNsite), I came across many valuable resources for ways in which to rethink customer (reader) engagement in light of this generation. One of these is the NAA Foundation (http://www.naafoundation.org), which publishes a great deal of research on the topic of engaging younger readers, replete with examples of engagement strategies being tested by educators and publishers, much of which can be applied outside the newspaper industry.

With regards to the native’s multi-platform tendencies, the NAA suggests that we stop scoffing at multitasking and make it work for us instead. They ask, “Have you ever thought about what kinds of products you might provide that would work well with the other things young people do?” In the information industry, we certainly see an increase of products that integrate information into workflow on a variety of platforms. However when we look to the future, at the digital native, integration will have to go beyond workflow, and integrate the consumer into all aspects of content consumption, distribution, and even creation.

We all see an increase of social sharing mechanisms on consumer and professional information products, and even on public library sites. However, these tactics are only a start. The NAA “Youth Media DNA” report states that, “respondents were more likely to recall reading school newspapers prepared by their peers … rather than newspaper youth content prepared for them.” In fact, UK research firm Capgemini found that for an increasing number of young users, content gets added value from the ability to discuss it collectively (http://bit.ly/e93AJr). These online community dynamics alter traditional patterns of trust: consumers, especially the younger generation, have more confidence in peer-generated or crowdsourced content. So while previous generations might have been loyal to trusted info-brands, younger consumers trust their social lens to focus them on worthwhile information.

When we look forward to creating products and services that will engage our next generation of content consumers, we need to be aware that their different content consumption habits are not a death knell. Rather, if we understand their desire to consume content on their own terms, on a variety of platforms, actively engage with it in a socially mediated way — and even participate in its creation — we can chart a path to engagement that will resonate with this generation of content consumers.

Michelle Manafy is director of content for UK based digital publisher, Free Pint, Limited (www.freepint.com), which provides publications and resources that meet the needs of information professionals. An award-winning writer and editor, Michelle’s focus is on emerging trends in digital content and how they shape successful business practices. She is also the co-editor of and a contributor to the new book Dancing With Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation that is Transforming the Way Business is Done (http://bit.ly/DwDNsite).

Scott Schulman, President, Dow Jones Corporate Markets

A colleague of mine once said of the Internet that “free costs too much.” This was no Neanderthal. On the contrary, he recognized the inherent and significant value of the medium and even much of the content therein. He was referring rather to the time we waste and the opportunities we miss, to the imprecision and outright inaccuracy of a Web that is at once essential and untrustworthy.

The world is waking up to the reality that having all the information in the world just a few keystrokes away isn’t enough. Certainly not for business. To get from data to decision takes more than just information. It requires most of all trusted content along with a reasonable assurance that you’re finding and not just searching.

The free Web is an amazing resource – that is for sure. But not every link is worth following. Not every source on the free Web is reliable. We know that. In a knowledge economy where commerce is driven by ideas, businesses cannot take a haphazard approach to information. They need sources they can trust, that save time, avoid information overload and anticipate their needs. Business needs sources to help improve awareness and efficiency and that curtail risk.

You would have thought that by now we’d have a more nuanced view of the value of Internet content. Today’s prime search engines aren’t designed to minimize the clutter; they’re designed to maximize your clicks because that’s where the money is made.

Then there are the results themselves. They are in large part the reflection of connections. The more links to a given page, the greater weight given the results. The more likely the page is to attract traffic, the more likely it will turn up in your search. Not exactly how you find the needle in the haystack if you’re a businessperson looking for opportunities. Independent research from Outsell indicates that one in three businesses searches fail. That’s zero productivity one third of the time. Why would a competent manager abide such waste? The real costs of inefficient search are probably much higher than just a one-third productivity haircut. Not having the right information at the right time is both cost and risk for business.

What business wouldn’t pay for the right information at the right time? Yet some still set “free” as the price point for awareness and thus their future. The Internet changed a lot of things, and rightly so. One thing it hasn’t changed is the value of quality. It is as essential in business information as ever.  Quality information, presented in effective ways, still has value; and that value is worth paying for.

Scott D. Schulman is president of the Corporate Markets Group of Dow Jones & Company where he leads the innovative business news and information products serving professionals and corporations worldwide. These services are designed to help business professionals better monitor and uncover opportunities in the markets, industries, companies and regions that matter most to them.

Mr. Schulman oversees core brands including Factiva, one of the largest electronic business aggregators and archives in the world, as well as Dow Jones Companies & Executives, Dow Jones Insight, Dow Jones Watchlist, The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition and more. These brands and other Corporate Markets Group services are designed to meet the needs of professionals in consulting and professional services, enterprise and business management; public relations and corporate communications; research and knowledge management; and risk and compliance. Mr. Schulman is currently leading a significant investment and expansion in Factiva as well as Dow Jones’ offerings in risk and compliance and corporate communications.

By Stephen Abram, Toronto Chapter, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Leadership & Management Divisions

Part 1

And the future is still in front of me and always will be! Cindy Romaine asked me to write a guest post for this blog and I am honoured to do so. I believe that her future ready theme is right on. The only thing we need to prepare for is the future. The past is gone and the present disappears in the blink of an eye. By coincidence I’ve just passed my 30th anniversary of graduating from library school and it’s caused me to reflect. I tell myself that I probably have another 30 years left. So I’ve decided that I am still mid-career. What have I learned in the first half of my library life about preparing for the future that may be in any useful?
Listed below are some personal insights that I’ve learned and have found them personally meaningful over the years, so I pass them on to you here in the hope that it helps us all become more future ready. Honestly, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and it’s probably better to learn that way, but here goes:

1. Watch the Banana: When it comes to observing user behaviour and changing behaviours it is wise to remember the banana. I was once forced to watch primates for days as part of a bachelor level primatology course. We often watched them eat. Upon returning to class, the professor gave us all bananas and asked us to peel them like an ape. North Americans grab the banana by the stem and pull it open. This method crushes the top. The whole class proceeded to do it this way. He then showed a film of an ape peeling a banana. If we carefully observe chimpanzees and bananas we can see that they carefully pull the skin of a banana from the softer non-stem end and the white fruit is pristinely unwrapped as a thing of unbruised beauty. The lesson for us budding primatologists and ethnographers that I never forgot: Observe carefully. Don’t look for what you expect. When you’re looking for insights into human behaviour or the direction of the world, you’ll find it in what you don’t see at first.
2. Play with Vigor and Intent: Everyone who knows me knows that I am a huge proponent of play in the workplace. This isn’t just playing with all of the new technology toys and websites that are presenting us with opportunities on a daily basis. I love that as much as the next person. What I am also advocating is that we also include ensuring that fun and humour enter our work lives on a daily basis (or more) too. Secondly, focus is good but focusing too intently is not as great. You can see opportunity in new things when you play. When you research or investigate something for work alone with your workplace goggles on, sometimes you miss the biggest opportunities in the innovation. Occasional undirected play at work loosens the unconscious and frees the mind to explore new ideas. Successful people and work teams leave time for play – alone and together. Play is not frivolous but remains one of the most potent learning strategies there is. And, frankly, it makes it fun to go to work every day. Happy teams, having fun together, is, I believe, a predictor of workplace success, employee retention, and lifelong health. Do you make time to play? Relax. You will see more opportunities for a better future in a relaxed state than all of the moments of intense concentration combined. Are you laughing and giggling enough all day? Live intentionally.
3. Hang out with different people and people who are different than you: Lately, I’ve been thinking about the echo chamber that is librarianship. I worry that we are listening too much to each other and not enough to others. I am not advocating that we listen less to eachother but that we adjust the balance to include more voices. How do our real customers talk about their encounters with the new information technologies? If we talk about ‘e-books’ and they talk about ‘reading’ (see the difference?), are we framing the issues correctly? And, how diverse is the community of people you deal with? Are there enough non-librarians, non family members, in your circle? How about the wonderful demographic mosaic of gender, age, nationality, ethnicity, race, language and geography in your conversation zone? Is it diverse? Do you have personal experience with young librarians and young people or vice versa? Do you travel enough to challenging experiences and places? Don’t sit with friends all the time at events or conferences – you already know them! People from diverse backgrounds can approach issues, decisions and problems in different and still valid ways. If your peers are non-diverse, I believe that it affects the quality of your insights and decisions. Mix it up.
4. Avoid the Eeyores! Some people add no value to your life and you run the risk of damaging yourself by being around them too much. People who are negative or critical in the extreme, but devoid of critical thinking are negative influences in your life. I love being around people who bang away at ideas aggressively to make them better. They’re awesome. I am talking about avoiding people who are joyless. As the economy gets worse, there seem to be more of these negative folks. Critical thinking allows for seeing weaknesses in an idea or argument and working toward correcting or improving or disproving the thinking. People for whom criticism, devoid of a context to improve ideas, where snark and name calling rule the day, are best avoided when the time can be spent with others who focus on making the world of ideas a better place. If you’ve ever met a person who is a black hole and sucks all of the life and happiness out of the room and conversation, you know what I mean. Run towards the light! The future needs to be somewhere where you want to be, and some people just can’t make that voyage. They’re locked in the ambiguity of the present tense.
5. Fail and Fail Often, but Fail Safe: You’ll discover the future by trying to invent it yourself. There are two kinds of people – those who create the future and those who live in their own personal, endless Hell of the present. Make the choice to be an animator in life. The avoidance of risk is death to growth and adaptability. Take small and manageable risks in order to learn. You’re not learning to ski or skate unless you’re falling down. How many small risks of failure did you take today? It can be as simple as meeting someone you don’t know, trying a new website, changing your
   personal style of interaction or something even bigger like loading new software or temporarily changing a work process. Try to recall when you learned to ride a bicycle. Remember the failures and then the heart floating feeling of balance and movement? I remember when I first tried public speaking with some embarrassment but I got better over time with my supportive SLA network. The opportunities to try new things are endless and, yet, we seem to partake of them too rarely. Can you schedule a daily potential-risk-of-failure-event until it becomes a habit and part of your work life? Grow pearls when you discover an irritant. Start small, pilot and experiment. Nurture and incubate. You’ll be a better professional for it.
6. Listen to your Gut: Bio-feedback works. I have learned to listen to my gut and persevere when I don’t feel right about something. Not every technology is future ready. Many have severe shortcomings or run the risk of damaging the world of information, knowledge, learning and more. Some just aren’t ready for primetime or anyone other than the early adopters. My subconscious tells me things if only I’d listen to it. I am not saying that it is telling me in black and white to do or not do something. It is often telling me things that affect the direction and experience. My gut senses distrust faster than my mind. It tells me when something might be conflicting with my personal or professional values or morals. My gut tells me when I’m not quite ready. My gut tells me when I have lingered too long in a lovely past paradigm that is now failing me. Trust your gut.
7. Do and Try: It’s not enough to be just an observer. Participate in the world as it changes. Comment and learn. Share – write, blog, tweet, and have deep conversations. Experience comes from participation. The person watching the gold fish in the bowl does not understand the goldfish.
8. Encourage the Heart: One of the most delightful aspects of librarianship is our supportive networks. Also our workplaces tend to be clean and safe. We have a personal responsibility to take this gift and improve upon it. We have potentially thousands of interactions a month. With each interaction, with each moment of truth, we represent the best of what we have to offer to the world. We can make a huge difference in people’s lives. And, with our attitude we can encourage the heart. Wake up every day choosing to make a difference in your end users lives, and, for that matter, all of your co-workers, neighbours, and colleagues.

Watch for part two and 10 more!

Stephen Abram, MLS is a Past President of SLA and is Vice President, Strategic Partnerships and Markets, for Gale Cengage Learning. He is an SLA Fellow and the past president of the Ontario Library Association and the Canadian Library Association. In June 2003 he was awarded SLA’s John Cotton Dana Award and the AIIP Roger Summit Award in 2009. In 2011 he is Canada’s CLA Outstanding Librarian of the Year. He is the author of Out Front with Stephen Abram and Stephen’s Lighthouse blog. Stephen would love to hear from you at stephen.abram@gmail.com.

by Eric Garland

The Special Libraries Association has chosen, most wisely, for this year’s theme to be “Future Ready 365.” The current moment is not only the perfect time to become future-focused, but moreover, the information professionals of SLA are the perfect group to help their organizations transform their cultures to make this possible. The key is intelligence.

Let us get some terms defined. The “future” is not just an extrapolation of yesterday’s growth trends – it’s a transformative disruption, a non-linear break from the world we know. Our current economy’s success has been based on the availability of endless resources, scarce information, and stable institutions. Tomorrow’s economy will be defined by scarce resources (notably petroleum, potable water, and certain heavy metals), endless information, and unstable institutions; a complete turnaround.

Yesterday’s success was driven by rapidly expanding industrial consumerism, buoyed by a large Boomer demographic and the complete failure of Soviet Communism. Every company, every country could follow essentially the same gameplan. Expand! Merge and acquire! Advertise! Downsize! Securitize! Profitize! Given unprecedented resource constraints, tomorrow’s success will be about each company, country, region, and individual choosing a creative path to transforming how value is created and shared. What’s more, as the financial system begins to strain under the weight of its own internal contradictions, we will not even account for it in the same manner.

Yes, this is a big deal. No, nobody has the answers. I don’t; as librarians, you don’t either. You will, however, begin receiving some very interesting questions.

• What is the business model of the future?
• Who are the competitors we haven’t yet even thought of?
• Who will our customer be in ten years? Twenty? Do we even know who they are yet?
• What are the wildcards, the low-probability, high-impact events that could mean disaster — or fabulous success?

Now that we know what might shape the future, we want to be ready. This does not mean you need to predict the future, but you can very well anticipate it, prepare in advance for your actions, and to act when prompted by events. To meet this high standard, an organization must have a steady stream of intelligence. This is where librarians can be major catalysts. You can become experts in where the best information resides, which questions to ask next, and even who can help answer them. Data is worthless, analysis is king, and insight is golden. As librarians, you can help your colleagues find trend data from the least biased sources and forecasts from the world’s best subject matter experts. You can ask the follow up questions - What does this mean? What information do we need next?  What scenarios are suggested by what we are finding?

Very few organizations create a culture that regularly asks these questions and provides the services that give answers. The ones who do are beating the market, indeed creating their own future. When SLA exhorts you to become future ready, it is declaring itself to be a group of leaders who truly understand what this transformation is about. Their challenge is daunting, exhilarating, and bound to make your intellectual life – and your career – an adventure for years to come.

Accept that challenge.

Author, speaker, futurist and intelligence expert Eric Garland guides leaders of all stripes through a world of chaotic transformation. He watches future trends, competition, geopolitics and everything else. He gives people ways to understand the change and make better decisions. You can read Eric Garland’s latest book, How to Predict the Future…and WIN!!!, follow him on Twitter (@ericgarland, and on the Web at www.ericgarland.co and www.competitivefutures.com.