by Anne Caputo, 2010 President, SLA

People of every generation think they live in a time of dramatic change–change far more revolutionary than any that came before. I try very hard not to be one of those who lament the loss of former times and say the past was better than the present. What I do say, however, is that we are living in a “new normal” state of affairs. Old assumptions and practices are passing away, and what we are left with has become a kind of replacement for what had been normal.

If we want to be Future Ready and thrive in the new normal we need to be mindful of four things:

First, a roadmap is required. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and many other books of whimsy said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” We don’t want to travel by just any road, but by the best-informed, best-prepared route. I would suggest we look to the Alignment Project and the emerging Future Ready Toolkit, which will offer elements to create our roadmap. The toolkit will provide resume templates and sample cover letters, brand-building suggestions and examples, communication tools, descriptions of best practices, and information about skills we can use to transition to other jobs.

Second, fundamental values matter. Our core competencies of selecting and acquiring the best and most appropriate content, organizing and describing content in ways that make it useful and findable, assisting in choosing the best sources, and teaching others to use our tools have never been more needed and more valued. We need to describe these skills in ways our clients can understand and continually adapt them to meet the needs at hand.

Third, follow the money. By this I mean we must believe in the value we provide, measure and articulate that value in meaningful ways, and create sustainable programs, organizations and services that fit the new normal. We are not, as a profession, skilled at measuring and articulating our return on investment, but the Alignment Toolkit will provide us with suggestions and examples for measuring and demonstrating value within our organizations.

Finally, action trumps inaction. Will Rogers, the American humorist, once said, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Holding back and waiting for someone else to take the initiative is not a good strategy at a time when the new normal is being invented. Take action to ensure you, your function, your skills, and your fundamental competencies become part of the new normal.

We must move away from old models that do not work while adopting new models that take advantage of our skills. Changes in information delivery, storage, organization, and acquisition beg for a new normal. We must become the centerpiece in making the new normal a success.

Anne Caputo is the Executive Director of Dow Jones Learning & Information Professional Programs. Additionally she is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, College of Library and Information Services. She was the 2010 President of SLA and is a history graduate of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Ms Caputo holds advanced degrees in architectural history from the University of Oregon and in library and information science from San Jose State University.

by Jim DelRosso, New York – Upstate Chapter, Academic Division

A digital repository is just an empty box; Amy Buckland said it, and it’s the truth. You can dress it up, debate issues of metadata and organization, but when it comes down to it your digital repository is just a container for digital objects. It’s just an empty box.

So is this:

Copyright © Bill Watterson and Universal Press Syndicate.

What matters is what you do with it, what sparks the imagination of you and your peers and your patrons and what drives action. If the repository stays an empty box, communicated about only in terms obscure to your patrons and pitched to them as one more obligation in a life filled with obligations, they’ll treat it like just so much cardboard.

But when you show it to them as a means to preserve their legacy, share their work with audiences who will value it, and create the kinds of collections they wished existed, then you will inspire them. Together, you will do things that once you could not have imagined.

As we strive to be future ready, we must remember that unless we connect a new application or technology to our patrons’ lives, it will remain at best a shiny bauble, briefly smiled at and then discarded. We’ll jump from trademarked buzzword to trademarked buzzword, effecting no change beyond the apps list of our smartphone.

But if we know our patrons, and make sure they know us, and partner with them to use every resource at our disposal to make their library experiences better, we won’t just be ready for the future: we will create it.

Jim DelRosso is the Digital Projects Coordinator at the Catherwood Library at Cornell University. He has been a member of SLA for several years, and is the Communications & Social Media Chair for the SLA Academic Division. He blogs at The Nascent Librarian.

by Christian Gray, Southern California Chapter, Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Division

Thinking about SLA President Cindy Romaine’s core tenets of Future Ready it is easy to see the convergence between pillars of Future Ready–career agility, alignment and community–and Corporate Social Responsibility/Social Responsibility (CSR/SR).

Your participation in CSR/SR can enhance your skill set and give you an opportunity to take on new roles and responsibilities giving you a more agile career.  CSR/SR is a very high profile matter for many public companies and other institutions. You will find yourself aligned with senior management’s desire to be a socially responsible organization by providing direct support to that department. And as CSR/SR relates to community, well it doesn’t take much effort to explain. That is what CSR/SR should be about, making a real difference in your community or the community that your organization represents.

I have several working hypotheses regarding CSR and SR which I hope to validate over the next few months:

1. Your personal participation in an SR program can increase your quality of life.
2. Your active support of your company CSR goals and objectives can have a positive impact on your career.
3. Being a leader for CSR/SR programs in your organization can lead to greater satisfaction in that role.
4. Professional associations and other business organizations benefit from participation in CSR.
5. Being an advocate and champion for CSR/SR programs can provide direct benefit to your clients, company and partners.

Recently I had a very late night of introspection and an honest evaluation of the many gifts I have in my life and had been aware of my growing need to be active in a community organization. I started researching non-profit organizations and even wrote a few checks. I joined the board of a local arts organization, Create:Fixate, and began to more actively participate in a group for which I had previously been a donor, LA’s BEST. Through that participation I reconnected with former associate Jim Howard, the founder of the Room to Read Los Angeles chapter.

Jim put the book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, in my hands and told me a little more about Room to Read. I was hooked before I even finished reading the book. I initially helped out informally, then facilitated their chapter strategic planning session. After visiting the global offices in San Francisco, I realized that what had begun as a conversation with an old friend had turned into not only an incredible project, but also a great and very personal passion.

My new-found commitment to caring and helping aligned with the broader community of colleagues I work with in the publishing and information industry, including clients, prospects, partners, publishers and even the Special Library Association. I was happy to discover that my commitment was also shared even closer to home, when I was casually speaking to my CEO at Reprints Desk, Peter Derycz, in December 2009 about life outside of work. While sharing my interest in Room to Read he got a funny smile on his face and began telling me about his own experience trekking in Nepal, how he wanted to start a school or library but was concerned about it being sustainable.

So like many good intentions, time passed and Peter’s plans faded until our conversation rekindled his own interest in creating a sustainable, positive change. Over the following weeks, Peter’s personal interest became a corporate initiative and a new partnership was formed between Reprints Desk and Room to Read. The result: basically every time there is a transaction (we deliver scientific articles to some of the largest research and development organizations in the world) Reprints Desk drops a small percentage in the Room to Read bucket. That commitment has, in one quarter, generated enough to fund more than 12 years of girls’ scholarships, including bikes and uniforms as needed, or more than 50 percent of a library, or more than 3,000 new books in local languages.

By integrating corporate social responsibility into Reprints Desk’s DNA, as we grow the company, the financial support and direct impact on children’s lives will grow with us. And that does not even count the impact of the initiative’s growing fan base. Both inside and around Reprints Desk, employees are making a difference around the world. While writing another line of code or providing customer service, our employees know clients are often thrilled to learn that their choice to use our services how has the added value of making the world a better place. As Peter and other senior managers have visited with the world’s largest publishers and they’ve learned about our partnership with Room to Read, many of these publishers are now asking how they can participate.

Over the past several years I’ve presented a series of talks about Career Agility to SLA Chapters and Divisions, sometimes solo, other times partnered with Cindy Hill or Kim Dority. One of the themes in these talks is emulating some of these positive characteristics of corporate leaders.  One key take-away has been that it is not only important to understand our own strengths, but to look at ways to channel our strength into action. I believe we have the means to do just that. To be an effective and valued contributor at your organization, you must consider becoming directly involved in your company’s CSR program. If your organization doesn’t have a CSR program, now is the perfect time to initiate one. Why? You will benefit by increasing your exposure to senior management, you can make a difference outside your enterprise and inside the “cause,” and you’re likely to gain tremendous personal satisfaction from your participation.

I hope this is the beginning of the conversation about CSR/SR and the role of the special librarian/info pro. We had a very engaged group during the SLA CSR Unconference session and we will continue the conversation via the SLA Social Responsibility group just started this week.

With over twenty-years of sales, marketing, business development and public speaking experience, Christian Gray has a unique and diverse perspective of technology, software and information companies. As a Strategic Account Manager for Reprints Desk, Christian has worked directly with many of the world’s largest life science companies including Amgen, Gilead, Genentech, Johnson and Johnson and Allergen, as well as other Fortune 500 Companies including Sony, Disney and Sun Microsystems.
Christian has been an active member of the Special Libraries Association since 2002 and is a past Board member of the Southern California Chapter and recently received an SLA Presidential Citation for his work on Future Ready 365.

Christian has given presentations to numerous SLA Chapters and Divisions and published a series of articles for Searcher Magazine, an Information Today publication on Enterprise Social Software. He has also been published in the Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles Business Journal.

30 Years ago I graduated from Library School – and the future was in front of me…
By Stephen Abram, Toronto Chapter, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Leadership & Management Divisions

Part 2
In part one I listed nine things I wished that my 1980 self (the freshly minted MLS) knew when I graduated in order to be future ready. Here’s another ten philosophies that I believe would help most people be more future ready (and I hope happy) :

1. Prefer Action over Study.
   If you or your team is studying something to death – remember that death was not the original goal! Although information professionals have a great core competency in research and study, we must know when to fish or cut bait. Recognize that studying something too long is staying in your comfort zone instead of making progress. In our somewhat risk-averse culture, this can be particularly difficult. What needs to be learned and understood is that delay is as big a risk as poorly considered action. Pilots and good process reduce your risk (and provide learning opportunities too). You can iterate your way to the future. This philosophy is closely related to the one where an enterprise values its conservative culture and gradually declines due to its lack of adaptation to modern expectations or changing external conditions.
2. Get Out of Your Box!
   It is unlikely that you are the alpha user profile. Understand that. I know that as an older, experienced librarian I am pretty limited in my ability to really connect and empathize with the challenges faced by newbie library, web or database searchers. I am not saying that I can’t overcome this, but I have to be explicitly aware that my training, biases and experiences have forever changed me and my perceptions of the information world. Also, my experiences are an old part of a different world and may not be fully relevant to today’s valid experiences of new librarians and end users. It also means that when I am designing services for seniors, kids, teens, challenged communities, the differently-abled, or even other professions like lawyers or engineers, I have to keep in mind that I need to be aware and prioritize their needs and competencies over my own. I need to build on their strengths and not repair them based on my perceptions of their weaknesses! I find that it pays to remind myself that I am not trying to create products and services for mini-librarians and that this is a poor goal in the first place. I need to understand the user’s context and needs and not project my own biases on them. For instance, it is likely that the end-user doesn’t actually want ‘information’ but, more likely, wants to be informed, entertained, taught and/or transformed in some manner. Libraries are great environments for that.
3. You can’t step in the same river twice
   This is ancient Confucian wisdom. It means, in our context, that our knowledge of new information or technology developments means that we probably cannot easily see all of the potential pitfalls or even its great potential. I remember when AltaVista was first introduced and many colleagues said that this couldn’t be the future of searching. After all, it had no fields, no true Boolean, and it didn’t allow the use of set searching! How could this be the future of online searching? Then along came relevancy ranking driven by the search engine’s algorithm – again pooh-poohed by my colleagues (and me for a while). Now along comes Blekko and I hear the same refrain. This time I am not so sure. After all, Google Scholar is still an infant. Can you point to someone’s beautiful baby and criticize her as being a lousy accountant? Keep yourself open to the movement of the river – it’s always changing and the river is strong. In the battle of the river and the rock, the river wins. Just look deep into the Grand Canyon and see the power (and beauty) of steady progress. Today we must invent a future for libraries that exists in a world of users who are literally changed in their perception of information use and the role of technology. Spend time understanding the beauty and strengths of your own box and then take a break outside of it occasionally.
4. Have a Vision and Dream BIG!
   “How will you shape the future?” When you try to be future focused and ready you are making a choice – to shape the future not just be ready for it. Have the confidence to build the future with your ideas and energy. I have seen the power of vision in every workplace I have been employed in. When it is absent or lost the workplace is missing something and verges on a horrible environment. When a shared vision is present we have achieved great things. When the vision doesn’t have enough stretch in it, things seem mediocre. Think back to great work environments you’ve worked in or great leaders you’ve worked for and you’ll usually find there were some great and compelling visions at work there. And for those who don’t dream big and have a vision, they’re doomed to an endless series of the present. I hope they love the way things are.
5. Ask the Three Magic Questions:
   a)What keeps you awake at night?
   b)If you could solve only one problem at work, what would it be?
   c)If you could change one thing and one thing only, what would it be?I have discovered that these questions are truly magic. They start conversations with users rather than delivering simple answers. They’re open-ended instead of closed-ended, yes or no answer questions. They avoid assumption. Just set the context and ask away. I have used these questions with primary school kids, titans of industry like Bill Gates, librarians, IT managers and cabinet ministers. These questions work every time to delve deeply into our users’ needs and personal goals. When we are armed with that knowledge then our libraries are unstoppable.
6. Feedback is a Gift
   One of my closest and dearest friends taught me this when In was having trouble dealing with a round of public and negative feedback. She told me that, like that wedding gift from Aunt Sally, you can keep it, display it, return it, or hide it in the closet. It’s your personal choice. Don’t overvalue one piece of out-of-context feedback or let it loom out of perspective and balance. I have learned over my life that objections to my ideas are best handled two ways: listening more, or framing the objection as an opportunity for more information and education. Feedback is best digested in the aggregate rather than in small doses. Squeaky wheels are fine and need to be oiled. But if it’s the engine that needs attention, then that poorly oiled wheel is just a distraction. Feedback shouldn’t be cause for stomach-wrenching stress. You are in control of how it can be dealt with (good or constructive or bad) and need to hear and accept this gift from your stakeholders. Do you have feedback mechanisms in your life?
7. Sacrifice is the Magic Sauce of Setting Priorities
   Every person and organization has thousands of ideas that are worthy of consideration. No one can do them all. That’s the tough part. When you have 100 good ideas to choose from the critical skill isn’t choosing the best 5 but sacrificing 95. Learn the skill of temporary sacrifice. You can store your good ideas in an idea parking lot and bring them forward into the strategic planning process as projects are completed. If you don’t focus and choose to limit your energy to achieving success on those that will deliver the most value to your enterprise and users, then you are choosing mediocrity. Sacrificing ideas isn’t forever or a loss. Time was invented so everything doesn’t happen all at once. Give your ideas time to grow and gain acceptance.
8. Build for the Future and Embrace Ambiguity
   Too often projects that are planned for 18-36 months naively assume that things will stay the same technologically. Remember the lessons of the past where the things mutated quickly – DOS became Windows, diskettes became CD-ROMs, Netscape begat MSIE which begat Firefox, online dial-up became web broadband, etc. You can’t be certain of the future but you can’t wait for total stability either. That’s the ambiguity. Dealing with ambiguity is a key competency in change management and introducing innovation. Stability is a chimera. Only fossils are truly stable.
9. No Mistake is Ever Final
   One of my better bosses had this phrase framed in needlepoint on the wall of her office. We were part of a skunkworks that was tasked with re-technologizing a major corporation as well as introducing transformational cultural change into a huge publishing sector. No small task. Not only did we make many mistakes, but we learned from them. If we weren’t making mistakes we weren’t trying hard enough. Albeit, we tried to limit the exposure of our experiments, but like learning to ride a bike, if you’re not falling down, you’re just not learning well enough. Her sign “No mistake is ever final” encourages us to try just that little bit harder to achieve greatness because we knew we had her support. If you want to change things for the better, you have to be a change agent and that means you have to be more comfortable with making mistakes and dealing with them effectively – and learning all the time.
10. Have some Fun!
    We are often too serious. Our work is serious and our impact on our communities and the world is enormous! However, working creatively, trying new things and being innovative is fun. Take the time to recognize that and live your life to the fullest. Celebrate your successes and your team’s work. Champion your library’s achievements! Reward your colleagues when they succeed. Don’t ever get so heads-down that you can’t see the big picture. It’s a wonderful world.

Congratulations to Cindy Romaine, SLA, and the SLA board and network for actively seeking the future for over 100 years. I am more future ready for having been involved with SLA and learning from such a great group of colleagues.

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 Dale Stanley

Seth Godin recently blogged on the topic of “Reject the Tyranny of Being Picked” http://bit.ly/fGzcCW. I cannot think of a more pertinent and helpful concept in making ourselves “Future Ready.” We have grown up waiting to be “picked.” Whether it is for teams on the playground, for “Mr. Right,” to be recognized for our great service/profession, for the next promotion, or for some wonderful employer to somehow find our resume on LinkedIn. The best advice I can imagine is to stop waiting to be picked. And DO something.  Any little next action is sufficient as a start. The best career move I ever made is when I took a half- day, figured out why I was bored, and then decided what just one next physical action to do about it. When you become proactive, you begin the journey of making your own future.  This, of course, is the best way to be “future ready.” If you want to learn more about being proactive and having goals, read Stephen Covey http://bit.ly/6N9pR7. If you want to begin to realize the power of “next actions,” read David Allen http://www.davidco.com/. But the main thing is to stop waiting. And, as Seth puts it, “Pick yourself.”

Dale Stanley is the Director of Literature Resources at Gilead Sciences, an occasional consultant with SMR International, and has been co-instructor with Guy St.Clair and Cindy Hill in SLA’s Click University certificate programs in Knowledge Management and Knowledge Services.  He has many years of industry experience leading information groups in the medical device, industrial/office products, and pharmaceutical industries.