By James King, Information Architect, NIH Library (Washington DC Chapter, Government Information Division)

Best Practices for Government Libraries is a collaborative document that is put out annually on a specific topic of interest to government libraries and includes content submitted by government librarians and community leaders with an interest in government libraries. The 2011 edition includes over 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 60 contributors including librarians in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, and more. Best Practices is edited by Marie Kaddell, Senior Information Professional Consultant; SLA DGI Chair.  If you did not write for this year’s Best Practices, Marie invites you to submit a guest post for the Government Info Pro marie.kaddell@lexisnexis.com.

The information in this article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the National Institutes of Health. Any mention of a product or company name is for clarification and does not constitute an endorsement by NIH or the NIH Library.

When Eugene Garfield envisioned the citation index in 1955, he wanted to improve information retrieval by showing relationships between articles based upon their citation and reference history. A potential side benefit of the index was to monitor the growth and structure of scientific knowledge, but neither the corpus of published data nor sufficient computing power was readily available to effectively do so.

This benefit is now within our grasp due primarily to the work of large-scale indexes like Thomson-Reuter’s Web of Science, Elsevier’s Scopus, and the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) PubMed. In addition, two factors have converged to create a strong need for bibliometrics. First, scientific knowledge has continued to grow and became more specialized, making it harder for a small group of experts to effectively review research proposals without relying on an objective measure, forcing an even greater reliance on computerized methodologies. Second, at the same time that science has become solidly global and collaborative in nature, the pools of research funding around the world have been shrinking. This has increased competition for scarce funds and put additional pressure on funding organizations to show the value of their research expenditures.

A recent large-scale example of how bibliometrics affected science was the 2005 Department of Defense (DOD) Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) review process, which required all DOD research groups to submit aggregated publication and citation counts for written articles that were used in research during a two-year period. These counts were then included in deliberations about which military bases and research labs to close, which to combine, and which to move. U.S. military libraries around the world scrambled to help their military labs respond to these critical data analyses, demonstrating how information professionals could play a role in defining and defending the value of the research organizations in which they serve.

I believe information professionals are in an ideal position to develop a set of valuable services that define and defend the organization’s value. To do this effectively, it requires an understanding of the scientific and business need of their organization, an agreement on the organization’s preferred measures of success, a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the various measures available (including the algorithms that underlie them), and a clear understanding of how the metrics are best applied.

EXAMPLES

An example of how libraries can utilize existing tools to create useful evaluative reports for stakeholders comes from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) Library. Library staff compiled the number of publications produced and the number of high-impact papers (from the top 50 percent to the top 0.01 percent) published by each WRAIR researcher, plus the number of citations of each researcher’s works. These measures were entered into WRAIR’s balanced scorecard, a strategic planning and management system that provides a framework of financial and performance-based measurements tied to the vision and strategy of the organization. By also comparing the output and average citation count of Army research publications on a discipline or topic, such as malaria vaccine or drug research, to the total output in the discipline, the library is also able to show the impact of its researchers on areas of interest to stakeholders.

Over the past several years, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been working on another approach to creating useful metrics. By identifying and capturing the metadata of all journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, U.S. patents, and technical reports written by NRL researchers and engineers, they automatically create a number of useful reports. Examples of these reports include a bragging list of the 25 most frequently cited NRL papers of all time, the journals in which NRL papers are most often published, and—with some analysis by a third party—the patents that have cited NRL work. This effort came out of a mandate from the NRL director of research requiring all scientific promotion candidates to submit a publication list with citation counts generated by the research library.

A number of other U.S. government agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), have also pursued the creation of internal databases of all agency-produced materials. In a similar vein, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires that all publications resulting from NIH grant funding be deposited into NLM’s PubMed Central database. Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the former director of NIH, pushed for this mandate specifically so that NIH could have a tool to measure research productivity.

WHICH MEASURES?

In pursuing an effort like this, it is critical to know what to measure and which measures will be of value. The WRAIR example relied upon the institute’s balanced scorecard to tie metrics to the strategic plan, while the NRL tied its effort to a research mandate.

The Bernard Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis provides a great model for libraries to use to assess the impact of research. Though focused on biomedical research, it can easily be applied to any research setting. The model highlights five key areas to explore when measuring research impact:

• Research output – counting how many publications were made and tracking the various outputs;
• Knowledge transfer – determining if the research was referenced or reused, including counting the number of references to those publications;
• Clinical implementation – identifying whether the research was applied to practice (e.g., used in a patent or a medical protocol);
• Community benefit – assessing whether the research made a difference in efficiency, effectiveness, or quality of life where it was applied; and
• Policy enactment – evaluating the research’s impact on laws, policies, and regulations in the pertinent sphere of influence.

Some organizations, such as NIH, have also been fortunate enough to have the resources to work with index providers to create robust, customized views of their data. One NIH-hosted service that uses customized data is Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT), which is designed to support the extramural research community by providing per-year data on grants as well as disease portfolios. This service allows users to search a repository of intramural and extramural NIH-funded research projects from the past 25 years and access publications (since 1985) and patents resulting from NIH funding. Search results can include the research project number, project title, contact information for the principal investigator, name of the performing organization, fiscal year of funding, NIH administering and funding Institutes and Centers (IC), and the total fiscal year funding provided by each IC.

A second NIH-hosted service, the Electronic Scientific Portfolio Assistant (eSPA), helps the intramural community evaluate the outcomes (including outputs and impact) of NIH funding. It is primarily focused on helping review and analyze portfolios of research projects for program planning and evaluation. By combining research funding with publications, custom portfolios of research can be created to help program managers and administrators track and evaluate their research.

The NIH Library has recently engaged the RePORT and eSPA groups, as well as other groups across NIH, to encourage the addition of bibliometric measures and more researcher-focused reporting in their tools.

CHALLENGE/OPPORTUNITY

Dr. Garfield’s vision was to explore the relationships and networks of scientists so he turned to publications as what is still one of the richest sources of relationships through co-authorships, references, and citations. As a natural step in this evolution and personally one of the most intriguing development efforts to date in this area is a NIH-funded effort to develop a national network of scientists built upon the initial work of Cornell University. This effort, dubbed VIVO (vivoweb.org), is an open source semantic Web project being built by libraries and has the potential of changing the way researchers collaborate by enabling the discovery of research and scholarship across disciplines.

Well-placed information services and resources that specifically meet the needs of our community will continue to make the difference between success and failure, even life and death. However, as distribution costs in the digital world approach zero, we must be willing to rethink the traditional view of library as a place and the traditional services that have been offered. Will today’s information professionals be brave enough to critically evaluate the current slate of services to reduce what is no longer of value in order to free time for new services like the ones described? I believe that exploring new roles like the one described in this article has the potential of opening new doors in the organization and applying our expertise in new ways. If we as a profession are to continue to be relevant in this era, we need to be willing to take risks.

Note: The author wishes to thank Gali Halevi, account development manager for Elsevier, who provided tremendous support in the creation of this program and in the writing of this article.

James King is an information architect at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, working for the NIH Library in the Office of Research Services. He is the immediate past president of SLA’s Washington, D.C., Chapter and now serves as the chapter’s Webmaster and as convener of the association’s Information Futurist Caucus. He recently helped Gali Halevi of Elsevier to coordinate a one-day seminar, Impact and Productivity Measurements in a Changing Research Environment, at which speakers shared their perspectives on various research metrics. The presentations from the seminar, which was hosted by Elsevier, are available free online at http://rainingdesk.elsevier.com/bibliometrics2010?utm_source=ECU001&utm_campaign=&utm_content=&utm_medium=email&bid=PJFG62F:VLGVS1F.

By George Franchois, Director, U.S. Dept. of the Interior Library, Washington DC Chapter, Government Information Division

Best Practices for Government Libraries is a collaborative document that is put out annually on a specific topic of interest to government libraries and includes content submitted by government librarians and community leaders with an interest in government libraries. The 2011 edition includes over 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 60 contributors including librarians in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, and more. Best Practices is edited by Marie Kaddell, Senior Information Professional Consultant; SLA DGI Chair.  If you did not write for this year’s Best Practices, Marie invites you to submit a guest post for the Government Info Pro marie.kaddell@lexisnexis.com.

Planning for a major move of a library collection can be a daunting and intimidating task. This is especially true when much of the collection will have to at least temporarily be stored at an offsite location, away from your patron base. The Department of the Interior Library is facing just such a dilemma next year, when renovations to the Stewart L. Udall Main Interior Building in Washington will force the Library to move out of its current location for 1 ½ years. During that time, most of the Library‘s current print collection will be temporarily relocated to an offsite warehouse in the Washington area, inaccessible to patrons. A small portion will be housed in a temporary library in the Udall Building during the course of the renovation.

The challenge that our library, or any library in a similar situation faces, is that of retaining the high level of quality services that patrons have come to expect, even if many resources relied on in the past are no longer readily available. The DOI Library is looking towards electronically available resources to help bridge a good part of that gap (within the limitations of our budget). The hope is to provide Departmental employees and other patrons to our small, temporary library, electronic access to materials that had heretofore only been available to DOI Library patrons in print.

Planning Ahead

When a move or temporary relocation of a library by an organization or agency is in the planning stages, that library should look at it as a potential opportunity to redefine itself, providing new formats of resources that can still fulfill the general mission of the library. In today‘s fast-paced society, demands are being placed upon both information providers and information seekers to supply and gather reliable, authoritative data as quickly as possible. Having large parts of a collection located in a warehouse miles away with no other recourse does little to foster instantaneous access to those resources.

Library‘s facing relocation should start planning for it as soon as the decision to move or renovate has been made. Usually decisions regarding building renovation are made at least two or three years ahead of time. During this time, the library staff should work closely with its budget office to make sure that enough resources are in place to measure the collection, hire reputable library movers, and rent a warehouse that meets the environmental standards needed to house the collection. Additionally, a library facing this type of relocation should emphasize to their budget office the need to move towards digital library services in lieu of ready access to most of its print collection. If funding can be found a few years ahead of time and online access to new databases can be started in advance of the move, it allows for a much smoother, less-harried transition period.

Many of the decisions on what electronic resources to purchase depend on type of library being uprooted. For example, medical libraries should probably concentrate on purchasing subscriptions to electronic databases which provide access to scientific and medical resources. Other libraries that deal with energy and the environment should seek electronic resources that concentrate on providing reference and journal resources on those issues. Specific databases selected by a library depend on the specificity and nature of the subjects dealt with at the library, the software and hardware resources available to support access to the database, and the skill set that their patron base brings to the table. The purpose of this article is not to identify names of specific online databases that would be best to use to substitute for relocated print resources, but to identify the general process involved in thinking this through. Specific online resources acquired by a library will and should vary on a case by case basis.

In the case of the DOI Library, a large percentage of materials used in our collection come from our legal and legislative resources. Over the past few years, our Library staff has identified several electronic databases that can provide patrons with online access to materials such as the Congressional Record, Federal Register, U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Congressional reports and hearings, and collections of federal legislative histories. In addition to being able to provide these resources electronically to DOI staff in, and visitors to, the Udall Building, the Library has been able to secure IP-address authenticated access to these databases for DOI staff nationwide. Thus, DOI staff located in Anchorage, or Albuquerque, or the Everglades can get access to these databases through the use of their DOI-provided office workstation.

Communication and Patron Participation

Decision-making on potential electronic resources does not have to solely be the mission of the library staff. It is advisable to bring in frequent library users to assist the library staff in the selection process. Keep in mind that it is important to be up-front with your patrons regarding the timelines involved in moving the library. In addition to simple word of mouth, this can be done through newsletters, e-mail announcements, flyers in the library, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or through library user groups.

As timelines can often change, based on changed priorities or budgetary issues, updates need to be circulated through the user community. Be sure to keep patrons updated as to any changes that may occur.

During the process of informing patrons about the relocation of a library, the library staff should see if there are patrons who might want to more actively participate in decisions made regarding the move. This can include the formation of a library users committee, if one doesn‘t exist already, that can work with the library staff to guide the library through its transition. Those that join such a committee should be willing to provide input into some of the following questions:

• Which print resources should be retained in a small temporary library on site as opposed to those resources that can be stored remotely?
• What electronic resources might be a good substitute for some of the print resources stored remotely? Would the users committee be willing to participate (along with the library staff) in possible free trials to those resources to determine their usefulness?
• Are there print resources either no longer relevant to the collection or duplicative of something available electronically that should be removed entirely before the relocation? Would there be any reason to keep these print materials?
• What electronic resources are currently provided by the offices that the patrons work for? If they have access to selected online databases through their own office, is there a need for the library to provide the same service?
• What computer resources should be available in the temporary library and what should eventually be made available upon the completion of the renovation project when the collection returns to its original space?

Throughout this process the library staff should try to meet regularly with the users committee, perhaps as often as every other week. This allows the library staff to communicate to the users some of their ideas and plans for not just new online databases, but for access provided to other informational materials in the library (both in the temporary library and warehouse) as well. Likewise, regular user forums allow the users committee to relate some of their desires, hopes, and fears with regards to access to materials during the building renovation. This would not just include plans for access to electronic and print materials in the temporary library, but also a review of plans for the future renovated library.

When a consensus is reached between the library staff and the users committee, it usually results in a smoother transition to new services and resources, as well as the elimination of services and resources that are no longer needed. It also eliminates the element of patron surprise that can accompany a decision made solely by the staff of the library, without the input of its users.

Training Your Staff and Patrons

Upon making a decision to subscribe to a new online database, it is important to train both the library staff and library patrons on how to best use the new resource. One way that library users can get the most out of any new online database is by learning the tricks and features of the database as taught by expert trainers from the database vendor.

Most online database vendors are more than willing to send expert trainers to a library that has a subscription to their online resource. They often have suggestions as to specific training sessions that they offer that might work best at a particular library. This is often an added benefit to a subscription that many libraries don‘t take full advantage of. Trainers can teach courses that introduce the database to library staff and patrons, or they can focus on specific features or types of searches that can be accomplished using the database. For example, vendors that provide legal and legislative databases to the DOI Library offer us courses in legislative or regulatory history research.

Training doesn‘t have to stop soon after a database has been introduced. Training courses on databases offered by a library should continue to be offered on a regular basis. This way, those who may have missed an earlier training program can still register for training at a later time; while others who might want to follow up on something they were taught at an earlier session have the opportunity to do so as well. Regularly scheduled training sessions allows users to refresh their memories regarding materials available from specific electronic resources, as well as keep up to date with new features that may have been added to a database since the last training class.

At the DOI Library, we try to offer a different training program on a subscription database every two to three weeks. Over the course of a six-month period of time, we manage to hold at least one training session on each of the online databases that we provide to DOI staff and visiting library patrons. Rotating these classes gives our patrons the opportunity to learn more about all of our online databases, whether they be general reference, scientifically based, or those that deal with legislative and legal issues.

Additionally, if the resources are available, libraries should bring the training to the user. If trainers can travel to different locations where large numbers of employees with access to these databases are, encourage them to do so and offer training classes on site. If travel to these locations is not possible, encourage the use of remote online meeting or webinar software to bring those at locations far away into your training session. Providing training to the user at their location or at their desktop allows them to feel as though the library is coming to them, instead of making them come to the library as was required in the past.

Again, communication is an important factor in insuring the success of training sessions. Regular meetings with the users committee can help establish which training sessions patrons are most interested in seeing offered and how they should be offered. Once a slate of training sessions has been agreed to, tools such as LAN messages, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails, newsletters, flyers, and posters can be used to publicize these programs to the user community.

Libraries should also be encouraged to offer these courses to those outside their delineated user community. Many in the general public interested in subject areas covered by a library would be as interested in attending these training classes as those working for the library‘s home organization or agency. Publicizing training classes through local chapters and divisions of the Special Libraries Association, American Library Association, the federal librarian‘s listserv, and organizations with an interest in topics covered by the mission of a library can help bring about a successful and well-attended program. Promoting these programs to other libraries can also provide great benefits to others in the library community. It allows these libraries the opportunity to review these databases, discuss possible trials and subscription packages with vendors, and eventually make decisions on whether or not to purchase subscriptions themselves.

Returning Home

Subscriptions to online databases replacing print resources that need to be temporarily stored need not be dropped once all print materials are returned to the original library home following renovation. Electronic access to materials formerly only available in print will allow anyone in your organization, no matter where they are located, to retrieve needed information. No longer will they need to physically visit the library or request that a librarian photocopy or scan materials and send them along.

Digital access to these resources will not only allow patrons to bridge the information access gap that exists while a library collection is in storage, online access will continue to allow users the instantaneous access to data they need in our ―I need it yesterday‖ world. Print resources will not ever go entirely away and many print resources may never be available digitally. However, in situations where print resources are unavailable, librarians should encourage their administrations to move towards the acquisition of electronic resources to meet the information needs of their clientele and keep their libraries relevant.

George Franchois is the Director of the U.S. Department of the Interior Library in Washington, DC, a position he has held since 2006. He also serves on the Federal Library and Information Center Committee’s (FLICC) Executive Board and FLICC’s Education Working Group, coordinating its “Great Escapes” program series. He is active in the Special Library Association’s Government Information Division and served as its Programming Director from 2008 to 2010.

During his time as Director of the Department of the Interior Library, Mr. Franchois has worked with Interior Department officials and the library staff to greatly increase the number of electronic resources available to Interior Department personnel around the country through the Library’s website (http://library.doi.gov). He has implemented a series of regular training programs on print and electronic resources available at the Interior Library, as well as special programs highlighting National Park Service sites and resources in the Washington area. All of these programs have been made available not only to Interior Department personnel, but also to the general public.

Prior to his current appointment, he worked for Lockheed-Martin/Aspen Systems Corporation as the Project Manager/Reference Librarian for the Interior Library staffing contract from 2002-2006, and served at the Interior Library as Deputy Project Manager/Reference Librarian from 2000-2002. Prior experience includes Library Technician positions at the Interior Library, Broadcast Pioneers Library, and EPA Headquarters Library.

Mr. Franchois received his Masters degree in Library and Information Science from the Catholic University of America and his undergraduate degree in History from the Pennsylvania State University.

by Marie Kaddell, Washington, DC Chapter, Government Information, Information Technology, Military Libraries Divisions

One of the high points of my year is editing the Best Practices for Government Libraries.  Best Practices is a collaborative document that is put out annually on a specific topic of interest to government libraries and includes content submitted by government librarians and community leaders with an interest in government libraries and government information. The 2011 edition includes over 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 60 contributors including librarians in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders and information professionals working outside of government libraries. 

As I put together Best Practices, I am always inspired by the energy, expertise, and forward-thinking perspectives that are showcased in the article submissions I received for the publication. This year, the topic was e-Initiatives and e-Efforts.  I broke down Best Practices into six areas that reflected some of the key trends that surfaced in the submissions:

• Embracing New Avenues of Communication
• Adapting To New and Evolving Technologies
• Altering Our Places and Spaces
• Tackling Changing Expectations, Resources, and Job Descriptions
• Preserving What We Have and Preparing for The Future
• Expanding Horizons

With authors writing on a suite of hot topics that included:  e-books, e-gov, embedded librarianship, library moves, mentoring, research metrics, social media, virtual reference, telework, and even virtual fundraising in Second Life, being future ready takes on all kinds of different dimensions.

Here’s a sampling of articles authored by SLA members:

• Ten Scary Issues: Future Directions for Military Libraries
  Edwin B. Burgess, Director, Combined Arms Research Library
• Utilizing Electronic Databases During a Library Relocation
  George Franchois, Director, U.S. Dept. of the Interior Library
• Research Metrics: Measuring the Impact of Research
  James King, Information Architect, NIH Library
• Embedded Librarianship and E-Initiatives: The Dynamic Duo
  Rachel Kingcade, Chief Reference & CSC Direct Support Librarian, USMC Research
• Future Ready 365
  Cindy Romaine, SLA President 2011
• Building a Framework to Embrace the New and Expand Your Horizons
  Bruce Rosenstein, Author, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker‘s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life
• E-Gov Sites to Go Dark?
  Kim Schultz, Outreach Specialist at the NASA Center for AeroSpace Information, operated by Chugach Federal Solutions, Inc.
• To Build a Virtual Embedded Information Role, Start at the Top
  Mary Talley, Owner, TalleyPartners, 2011 DC/SLA President
• Web E-Accessibility to Reach Full E-Audience: “Expanding Our Horizon” to Better Honor Diversity
  Ken Wheaton, Web Services Librarian, Alaska State Court System Law Library
• Podcasts Get Information Junkies their Fix
  Chris Vestal, Supervisory Patent Researcher with ASRC Management Services, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and DC/SLA‘s 2011 Communication Secretary

If you did not write for this year’s Best Practices, I invite you to submit an article next time around and in the meantime submit a guest post for the Government Info Pro. 

Want more Best Practices? View the 2010 Best Practices:  The New Face of Value in PDF version. 

Marie Kaddell is the Senior Information Professional Consultant for government at LexisNexis.  She is the Chair of the SLA Division of Government Information. She authors and maintains the  Government Info Pro blog. She compiles and edits the annual Best Practices for Government Libraries. You can follow her on Twitter @libraryfocus.

Valerie Ryder, Philadelphia Chapter, Leadership & Management, Business & Finance Divisions

As someone who thinks of her car as a mode of transportation, or a way of getting from Point A to Point B, rather than as a part of my brand image, I still believe in regular maintenance as an investment for the future of my vehicle.  While living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for many years, I was accustomed to having my car realigned every few years due to encounters with the many road bumps and dips that earned the city its reputation as the “Pothole Capitol of the United States”.  Pittsburgh drivers may complain, but they accept realignments as necessary maintenance to avoid more serious problems with their vehicles in the long term. 

While thinking about career sustainability recently, it occurred to me that the same analogy applies.  If one does not regularly assess oneself for alignment with the organization’s goals and mission, a rude awakening may be encountered down the road.  In my early years as a corporate librarian, I probably did not constantly think about alignment as it pertained to my job and career, at least not as frequently as I might have thought about my car’s alignment.  After experiencing a few of those bumps and dips in my own career path, I did start seriously contemplating the connection of what I did in my job with where the corporation was heading and what it valued.  Most importantly, I looked at how the strategic plan of the group in which I worked as well as my annual performance goals dovetailed with the corporate direction and objectives. 

I started asking myself, my co-workers, and my managers, questions that challenged some of our own assumptions and beliefs about how our group directly or indirectly contributed to the commercial success of the corporation.  When product lines or entire business segments were sold off or discontinued, I pondered how that loss might impact the services we provided, the scope of our collection, and our internal customer base.  When other companies were acquired, new product lines were launched, or research projects were started in novel areas, I contemplated how those gains could provide new opportunities.  As corporate directives were issued, I re-examined our internal operations to determine how we needed to adapt.  When leaders and key personnel departed, retired or were replaced, I looked at what roles they played in the corporation and their support for our group in order to anticipate and mitigate impact.  When new staff joined the corporation, I looked for opportunities to build relationships with key players and support their goals and objectives.  Throughout these alignment checkpoints, I was evaluating my skills and interests to determine how well they matched the ever-changing institutional needs. 

Just as good drivers stay aware of subtle changes in the way their cars handle the road, information professionals need to continually reassess the ways in which their job responsibilities, the tasks that they perform, and their own skills dovetail with the current needs and future requirements of their organization.  Refocusing and retooling should be an ongoing activity rather than waiting for an annual maintenance inspection to find a problem, or more significantly, an unanticipated “bump in the road” to derail your career. 

Valerie Ryder is Director of Information Strategy at Wolper Subscription Services, a one-stop information management resource whose High Tech, High Touch® approach delivers the perfect combination of next-generation technology and time-proven, personalized service.  Valerie joined Wolper in 2009 after a career as a corporate librarian for Fortune 50 and Fortune 300 companies, a solo librarian, and an information consultant.   

Valerie is active in the Philadelphia Chapter where she is currently a Board Member and the Employment Chair 2010 – 2011.  She was the Vendor Relations Chair for 2008 – 2010 and a member of the Program Committee in 2008.

Valerie contributed two chapters on corporate librarianship to the recently published book ”Best Practices for Corporate Libraries”, published by Libraries Unlimited, in which she shared her experience in “Measuring Value in Corporate Libraries” and “Corporate Librarian’s Survival Kit for Organizational Realignment”.  Valerie presented a Contributed Paper at the SLA 2011 Conference entitled “The Metamorphosis of the Information Professional” that is available on the SLA website.

by Marilyn Bromley, Washington, DC Chapter, Competitive Intelligence, Information Technology, Legal, and Social Science Divisions

Being Future Ready means more than just keeping your job knowledge and skills current; as we all know in today’s economy, the job you are in and the work you do can change at a moment’s notice.  Your position may be eliminated, your responsibilities may be substantially changed, your employer may go out of business or be sold, your department may be downsized or combined with another unit – the possibilities are endless, good or bad.

I know I’m more aware of this now than I was a few months ago, and I’ve begun to ponder the elemental question: what do I want to do with the rest of my life?  I love my career and hope to have many more professional years ahead of me, but just in case, what other life for myself can I envision and create? I want to volunteer, maybe work part-time, maybe create a short-term second career… who knows? (and not me yet!)

The SLA Encore Caucus (encore.sla.org) is a good place to start; on their website you’ll find informative posts like “Top 10 Ways to Prepare for Retirement,” “Long-Term Projections for Social Security” (read this when you’re in a good place!), and “Retirement Confidence Survey 2011.”  There is also an Encore Mindmap that I found helpful despite my uncertainty about what a mindmap is.  Under Resources, be sure to check out Transition Strategies.  It will help you organize your thinking and research your options; as information professionals, organization and research are our comfort skills and will help reduce uncertainly, fear and trepidation!

One recommended book by Encore members is Don’t Retire, REWIRE, Sedlar & Miners, 2^nd edition, Alpha, 2007.  The note says: Helps you identify your drivers and how to apply them to your new life as well as to create a rewired vision to put your action plan in motion.

In thinking about your finances, in the post “Whether retirement is Near or Far…” you’ll find this advice from Arthur Stein, certified financial planner with SPC Financial in Rockville, Maryland.

• reduce your expenditures five percent right now and see what that’s like;
• keep track of expenditures or go back retroactively and try and estimate how much you spent in the last six or 12 months. See where your money’s going;
• don’t do it before you get an actual retirement plan that would show that you’re ready;
• don’t pull the trigger (i.e. retire) too soon.

We owe it to ourselves, our loved ones and our society to have a Plan B and a Plan C in mind when our Plan A turns an unexpected corner. 

Marilyn Bromley is Library Director at BNA and past-chair of the Social Science Division, past president of the DC Chapter, and active in the Legal Division.  She is currently running for Director, 2012 SLA Board.

by Joseph Kraus, Rocky Mountain Chapter, Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics, and Science-Technology Divisions

For librarians and information professionals to be truly future ready, we should be able to predict the future, but of course that is impossible.  One of the ways I think about the future is to think about how accurate predictions of the present were in the past.  For the sake of picking a date, I am going to predict what things are going to be like for libraries and information centers in the year 2031 using 1991-2011 as the lens.  Since I am an academic librarian, this article will have an academic bent to it, and I hope you can extrapolate the logic to fit your situation.

When it comes to technology, Jason Griffey from the University of Tennessee says that the future is already here.  But if the future is already here, then what is going to happen in the real future?  I would guess that tablets are here to stay, and that ebook readers will also continue to grow in popularity.  Tablet and laptop computers will continue to get lighter, cheaper, faster, hold more information, and have more memory.  They will continue to follow Moore’s Law.  Cloud computing will continue to grow, especially as more and more data becomes available, and it needs a place to live.  Software will continue to fracture with more OS choices and more bloatware as the space becomes available. More and more people will communicate with each other using smartphones (or some other device) in the US and throughout the World.  Digital images and videos will continue to get easier to make, edit, store and publish online. 

Even though technology changes rapidly, social constructs and culture change more slowly.  In 1991, people:

• read books, magazines and journals in print
• watched television on cable, go to the movies or rent VHS movies from Blockbuster
• called each other on a landline telephone
• snail-mailed pictures to friends
• listened to music on the radio or on tape/CD
• met each other at bars or coffee houses
• drove gasoline-powered cars to go to those places

 
Today, in 2011, people:

• read books, magazines and journals (many with an e-reader or on the web)
• watch television (either on cable or dish), go to see movies, or get movies on DVD/Netflix
• call each other on cell phones, text each other or call someone on Skype
• see what friends are posting on Facebook or Twitter
• listen to music on an iPod or some other device
• meet each other at bars or coffee houses
• drive gasoline-powered cars (or a hybrid car) to those places

 
People still want to converse with each other either in person or using technology.  That will not change in 2031.  People will want to read, view, or make information products.  People will want to meet with each other, either in person or virtually.  Speaking of that, virtual meeting software is getting cheaper and easier to setup and use, so that will be used much more often in the future.

In my view, the publishing and media industry is a cultural and social construction.  In 1991, the major publishers had a good strong hold on the publishing industry, and they have a similar hold on publishing today.  In the last 20 years, major publishers have consolidated , and I don’t see the big publishing houses withering up and dying.  There has been a lot of activity in the Open Access front, and they offer some great alternatives to publishing, but they have not made a huge dent into the profit margins of for-profit publishing outfits. In the academic and STM publishing world, there is resistance to change in traditional publishing outlets. See Michael Clark and Josh Sternberg and Leonard Cassuto.  However, there are many people who say radical transformation of scholarly publishing is ahead. Cameron Neylon and Michael Nielsen  and Ingmar Mewburn and Nigel Thrift.

One aspect of change in the publishing industry has been the contraction of A&I sources. Since more and more content is found on the web, people are searching Google and Google Scholar to find scholarly content.  They are finding good enough information.  If Google Scholar (or some other search engine that might be developed in the next 20 years) really wanted to, they could put a big dent into the revenue stream of traditional citation searching database businesses. 

When it comes to social change for scholarly authors, they get rewarded through the tenure and promotion (T&P) process.  Many universities and colleges have been employing less and less tenured faculty, and there is debate over the long term viability of tenure on campus.  Many people think that higher education is ripe for disruption.

Be that as it may, the faculty who do research in universities and colleges are under pressure to publish this research in high quality sources.  In 1991, the perception of high quality journals was limited to certain journals and publishers, and over the last 20 years, it was very difficult for new sources to be added to those lists.  Over the next 20 years, these lists of journals and publishers will probably stay roughly the same because the administrations of academic institutions are very slow to change their T&P policies.

Some authors are starting to see the citation advantage of making their work available through Open Access sources, but this has been slow on the uptake.  Over the next 20 years, more faculty will see these advantages and change their behavior, but it will not be a quick change.

By 2031, the technology will have changed quite a bit.  Maybe we are typing in the air while we view our email in virtual reality glasses.  We might be able to talk to our documents, and the language is automagically translated into Russian for our colleague in Moscow.  We might be able to digitally video record our waking hours, so that we can easily remember dates, names, people, places and the things we thought about and said.  Whatever technological changes are ahead, the behavior and the culture of the people who use that technology will not change near as rapidly. 

Joseph Kraus is currently the Science & Engineering Librarian at the University of Denver (DU) Penrose Library. DU is a medium sized private university in Denver, Colorado. He is active in the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics and the Sci-Tech Divisions of the Special Libraries Association (SLA). He is also a member of ALA/ACRL and the American Society for Engineering Education. He has written numerous articles and has presented on topics from Library2.0 resources, unconferences and collection development.

Marcy Phelps, Advertising and Marketing Division (Chair), Rocky Mountain Chapter 

This blog’s included some great discussions about networking and how it’s essential to being future-ready. Mention the word ‘networking,’ though, and it often conjures up images of talking with strangers, wearing a nametag, and making small talk. You leave exhausted, with a stack of business cards to show for your efforts. For weeks, the cards sit on your desk, nagging you to follow up with everyone you met – until you toss them in the trash.  

It’s enough to make you retreat, not charge ahead into the future! If we really must network our way into the future, then why not replace those awful images with something better?  

This time, picture yourself meeting with like-minded people who work in your company or industry, share hobbies, or have similar views and beliefs. Over lunch or coffee, you make new acquaintances and catch up with long-term connections. The next day, you follow up with one contact that needs a good speaker for an upcoming workshop and send a useful article to another.  

Every few months, you stay in touch with these connections – over coffee, via email, or at other events. They introduce you to new connections, and you do the same for them. Someday, someone in this group will need a favor. It could be big or small, work-related or personal. Because you have a history of mutual respect and sharing, you do what you can to help or connect them with those who can.  

These two scenarios spotlight the differences between ‘networking’ and ‘building a network.’ Building a network is much more gratifying and worthwhile. Rather than talking about ourselves and seeing who can collect the most business cards, the focus is on listening, creating and fostering relationships, and sharing.  

But building a network doesn’t happen overnight or after one event. It’s an ongoing process, and a good network takes years to develop. While email and social media facilitate connections, it takes face-to-face time to develop true, lasting relationships. There are no shortcuts, and the time to make your connections is long before you need a new job, new employee, or someone to restore your hard drive after a late-night crash.  

Still would rather hide in your office or at home watching a marathon of NCIS reruns? Here are a few quick tips for getting motivated:  

• Learn from the experts. Building a networking takes work, and it helps to know what you’re doing. For example, I always learn lots of great tips from Harvey Mackay’s podcasts, and just listening to his enthusiasm makes me actually want to get out and meet new people.

  

• Start small. Rather than a 300-person networking extravaganza, attend company lunch-and-learns, volunteer for committee work, or opt for events where you know some of the attendees. You can slowly build your networking muscles.

     

• Set goals. Before you head out the door, decide what you want to accomplish, and give yourself permission to go home once you’ve reached your goals. I usually attend events with two goals in mind: 1) make plans to follow up and have coffee with one good contact and 2) help one contact with a referral.  

Replace the old images with some new ones, and start building your network now – for the future.  

Marcy Phelps is the owner a Phelps Research, a company she started in 2000 and has built by networking, networking, and more networking. She blogs at Power Networking for Introverts and MarcyPhelps.com.

Summary, recordings, and editing by Karen Huffman, Past Chair, SLA KM Division

Listen to what leading SLA KM members have to say in these short video recordings on the following KM topics:

KM Role Models: Introductions and Overviews of Roles (6:18 minutes)

Interviews: Patrick Lambe, Denise Chochrek, Dianna Wiggins, Ulla de Stricker, Richard Huffine, Nerida Hart, and Stephanie Jordan.

Description: Selection of ideas shared by knowledge management professionals about who they are and what they do (and love!).

KM Success Stories and Challenges (8:48 minutes)

Interviews: Ulla de Stricker, Mary Talley, Richard Huffine, Nerida Hart, Denise Chochrek, Patrick Lambe, and Dianna Wiggins.

Description: Seven leaders in KM from around the globe tell their success stories and challenges.

KM: Skills, Compentencies, and Experiences (6:14 minutes)

Interviews: Patrick Lambe, Denise Chochrek, Ulla de Stricker, Mary Talley, Richard Huffine, Nerida Hart, and Dianna Wiggins.

Description: What skills, competencies and experience do you think are important for your role as a knowledge professional? Learn what leaders in the field have to say.

URL: http://youtu.be/TlxcVR0c6Sk

Cynthia Reifsnider, North Carolina Chapter, Business & Finance, Competitive Intelligence, and Knowledge Management Divisions

“Future Ready,” when I started work at the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, meant revisiting the Business Intelligence (environmental scanning) program that my predecessors had built. The old system offered a web interface for typing records into an SQL database; it had no safeguards for copyright compliance and was time-consuming to enter information. Since no new records had been added for more than a year, there was no great pressure to resume use of the system. Environmental scanning and Business Intelligence are parts of the information profession that I’m passionate about, so finding a new and better solution was important to me.

With the help of a student intern from UNC’s School of Information and Library Science, I embarked on an information audit of our Institute’s faculty and staff. What were their research subject interests? How did they prefer to share information (electronically or in paper) and what were their communication tools (e-mail or file share)? What did Business Intelligence mean to them? Did they find value in the Business Intelligence system?

Our information audit returned a range of wants and needs but contained some core values. Our faculty and staff needed timely news and literature on subjects they were researching for grants and contracts they held, grant proposals they wanted to write, journal papers and conference presentations they were working on – and they wanted to catch more of what they felt they were missing, whatever that might be. Yes, they found value in the Business Intelligence system, but they would rather have updates pushed to them, preferably via e-mail.

From the perspective of my Office of Research Services, the emphasis needed to be on speed, agility, low investment of budget dollars and copyright. Some of the faculty wanted to be able to share findings with non-university colleagues, which complicated the copyright issue. Off-the-shelf digital library products proved too expensive to consider and required too much up-front customization. So what Knowledge Management solution was right for us?

The solution we settled on combines RefWorks as a citation manager; library databases, electronic news subscriptions and Google alerts for content; and Microsoft Outlook e-mail templates as a delivery mechanism.

We are fortunate to be homed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and our University Libraries offer RefWorks citation management software to campus users.

Our RefWorks implementation is connected directly to most of the Libraries’ e-resource tools including ScienceDirect, EBSCOhost, and IEEE Xplore; selected articles from these databases can be imported directly into RefWorks with a few mouse clicks to populate citations, abstracts and URLs. This connection enables quick and easy import of relevant items from most of the Libraries’ resources, either through one-time searching or use of TOC alerts.

The RefGrab-It plug-in in RefWorks enables us to import citations and URLs from non-PDF web pages with minimal editing required. The RefGrab-It feature makes it efficient for us time-wise to use Google Alerts for relevant news articles.

Further, my Office partners with the University Libraries’ to extend our RefWorks subscription to include the RefAware add-on, which enables our creating custom monitoring of specific journals and terms with e-mail alerts. The import feature from RefAware into RefWorks has a few bugs, but we have developed some short-cut workarounds to get past them.

RefWorks also gives us an easy way to build a digital library, create bibliographies, and search for results by keyword, folder, author, periodical, date retrieved, etc. By grouping our entries into folders by the Centers within the Institute, we made it easy to pull out the week’s new entries into a bibliography for individual Centers. Then we copy and paste the bibliography into our MS Outlook e-mail template (example below) with branding for our office (free marketing!). Our template also includes a link to the public RefShare access site to our RefWorks database, in case our users want to initiate their own searches of the archives. We have found, however, that our users prefer the weekly updates for accessing references directly rather than using the archives. Our office, renamed the Office of Research Services & Knowledge Management last year, frequently uses the archives to create new bibliographic reports and complete ad-hoc research reports in response to specific user queries.

The previous Business Intelligence system covered only 6 centers within the Institute. Our office currently covers 14 Centers and Offices within the Institute, plus 3 special projects. Some of our weekly e-newsletter distribution lists include external (non-University) recipients, who then give feedback to our faculty about how well-informed and current the Institute is about our research areas. My supervisor routinely sends Institute staff and partners our way to take advantage of this product and service. Feedback on our Business Intelligence system is overwhelmingly positive and includes comments such as how timely a reference is for a project or meeting or about the direct relevance the e-newsletter is to current work. Since implementing this solution in early 2009, we have entered close to 6,000 references into the system.

While the system is not completely without bugs, it does provide us with an efficient way to identify, capture, and distribute knowledge among our user community. It also provides us with a weekly branded communication to our users and clear value-add ROI to show our stakeholders, with little impact on our budget.

Ms. Reifsnider is Director of Research Services and Knowledge Management for the Kenan Institute and is the primary research and analysis source for the Director and the Institute’s Centers and departments. She is a subject-matter specialist across many fields of business and technology, including air commerce, logistics and supply chain, demographics, competitive intelligence, entrepreneurship, renewable energy, and market research. She also directs strategic planning for knowledge management and leads the business intelligence program for the Institute.

For the Center for Air Commerce, Ms. Reifsnider conducts research and analysis in support of the faculty’s projects, papers and presentations; oversees data management and database development; designs and implements knowledge management tools focused on the Aerotropolis concept.

Prior to her work at the Institute, Ms. Reifsnider was a Research Analyst in Hewlett-Packard’s Imaging and Printing Group for nearly five years. She holds an MSIS from the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill and a BS in Atmospheric Science from UNC-Asheville.

Contact her at Cynthia_Reifsnider@unc.edu , visit http://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/KI/ or on Twitter @kenaninstitute.