by Sara Batts, Europe Chapter, Legal, Business & Finance, Leadership & Management Divisions

Career-changing is flexibility in action. It’s being comfortable with the mindset that takes everything you know in one arena, chews it up, spits it out and moves on, adapting your skills and working styles to a new environment. This is my second career and one that, like many, I stumbled across serendipitously. (Saying ‘by accident’ sounds a little harsh, but it’s not far off.) There are a whole host of people’s stories at the Library Routes project and mine’s not unique. What has Future Ready come to mean? For me it’s been about throwing myself in the deep end: connecting with my professional peers via the UK’s BIALL and CLIG and globally via SLA; seeking to learn about new tools, new areas, and new ways of working. We career-changing new entrants bring great attitudes to the Future Ready party. We’re here because we choose to be: this is our profession and of course we’re going to promote our value and our worth. What’s this shy-and-retiring stereotype all about anyway? Whose rules are those to say what is and isn’t an information professional? And we’re not restricted by how things used to be or how we’ve always done things – we want to do what works now, and what will work tomorrow. We have already re-invented ourselves once: in my case from conference organiser to legal specialist; and from non-participant to unit leader – re-evaluating our role is second nature. We’ve been Future Ready since our first day at library school.

Sara Batts is SLA Europe’s president and is also involved a member of several divisions including Legal and LMD. She has been involved with SLA since winning one of SLA Europe’s early career conference awards in 2009 and is one of 2011’s Rising Stars. She’s been Senior Research Librarian in the London office of law firm Reed Smith for three years.

by James Kane

In 1930, a paper cup salesman for the Lilly Tulip Cup Company walked into a Walgreen’s Drug Store near 43rd St. and Bowen Ave. in Chicago, IL and changed the world.

That’s a pretty dramatic statement, but it’s true. You see, paper cups were big business in the early part of the 20th century. As scientists and public heath officials warned people about the dangers of drinking from unwashed glassware and shared eating utensils, disposable food and beverage products became all the rage. And, of course, where there is a rage, there is a salesman.

One prime target of these paper cup peddlers were drug stores. After prohibition became law in 1919, the introduction of the soda fountain in American drug stores not only filled the social void caused by the closing of bars and speakeasies, but ushered in the dawn of the soft drink. Egg cremes, Black Cows, and Cherry Phosphates became staples of the new American diet, and the glasses they were served in the target of every paper cup salesman in the country.

All except one.

While most cup vendors made the obvious pitch to the drug store owners and soda fountain managers – no more broken glasses, no more dishwashing, no more risk of spreading disease – our salesman had a different take.  When he first walked into the Walgreen’s off 43rd Street, he knew that he couldn’t make a sale using the same tired  arguments that others had made before him. So, instead of trying to sell the products he brought with him that day, he stood in the back of the room and watched.  More importantly, he learned.

It was just before noon when the store began to fill up with day’s lunch crowd.  He watched as the first ten patrons arrived and took up all the seats at the fountain’s counter. And then watched as one by one the people from the streets entered the store, looked around for a vacant seat, and walked out the door, having never bought a thing. It was all that watching that made everything clear.  He knew what Walgreen’s problem was, and it wasn’t paper cups.

The problem Walgreen’s had was the same problem every soda fountain of its day had.  Not enough space. Everyone wanted a seat, but those who got there first didn’t want to leave.  Without the turnover, the stores were losing sales – and lots of them! Our salesman knew by observing one potential customer after another walk out the door without being served that the answer was not cups, it was lids. He explained to the Walgreen’s manager how he would increase the soda fountain’s sales tenfold without adding even one foot of new counter space. Yes, he would provide them with paper cups, but every one of those cups would come with a lid, and the concept of “take out” was born.

This is a story about the power of insight and the importance of stepping back to see what the real problem is.  We all have our bag of goods – the things we try to sell to others every day. We come ready to explain our value and convince the non-believers of our importance, only to be left dumbfounded that they just don’t get it. The tried and true paper cup pitch is “we can SAVE you money.” The insightful one is “we can MAKE you money.”

We all fall into the trap of trying to sell what we have instead of selling what others need. The first requires doing nothing more than what you have always done, the second demands that you step back and understand what the real problem is. Being “future ready” is not only about knowing how to go forward, it’s about knowing when to step back. Knowing how to put yourself in the shoes of others and figuring out what they truly need and want.  What your boss needs.  What your institution and organization needs.  What your client and customer needs.  What your industry needs.  Sometimes you may have the solution in your bag.  Sometimes you will need to order lids.

Insight is not a magical gift we are born with. It is something we develop – by listening, by watching, by learning, and by practicing empathy. It takes some time to get good at it, but the results are definitely worth the effort.  They certainly were for our paper cup salesman. He made the sale to Walgreens, but practicing insight would bring him even  greater rewards. Standing in the back of the room and watching what was really going on gave birth to the take-out business, and forever changed the course of Ray Kroc’s life. Applying what he learned at the Walgreen’s drug store in 1930 would influence his decision to buy a small restaurant in San Bernadino, California 20 years later from brothers Dick and Mac McDonald. The rest, as they say, is history.

Merging the worlds of business, neuroscience, and behavioral psychology, James Kane is one of the leading researchers and consultants in the science of loyalty and the role it plays in human relationships and the communities we form.Kane makes the case that loyalty is a complex human emotion and a fundamental part of our human nature. When an organization or individual demonstrates those loyalty-building behaviors, they can develop relationships that will last a lifetime and result in unwavering and unlimited support.

SLA has retained the services of James Kane for a 12-month pilot program where he will audit and assess one Chapter’s current relationships, consult with and train Chapter leadership, and develop and implement loyalty strategies that will have broad applicability to other SLA units. He is the closing keynote presentation at the SLA Annual Conference in Philadelphia.  For more information see JamesKane.com

by Liz Wallach, Washington, DC Chapter, Environment & Resource Management Division

As we work to demonstrate our value to our organizations, we may be asked to participate in projects with other groups or divisions. Being asked to contribute to a project is an opportunity to showcase our skills and knowledge as information professionals. Here is a new project management concept that I recently learned about.

Agile Project Management gives a flexible framework for completing a project with an iterative approach. Agile is not new (only new to me) and it is not something that you learn quickly. There is a whole industry devoted to training seminars, consulting, and software tools. I had never heard about the Agile concept before attending a 3 day “boot camp” seminar last summer. I realized very quickly that I had a lot to learn.

The main advantage of using an Agile approach is that it allows you to make changes to your concepts as you move through the process. Agile participants accept that there is no way for you to know exactly what the end product will look like – no matter how many requirements you write. Ideas should evolve as you gather more information. So Agile allows you to refine and revise your concept as you learn more about the possibilities. These few sentences are just scratching the surface of how the Agile method works.

There are 2 reasons that I connect this with our FutureReady blog:

1. It’s healthy to be challenged by learning about something with which you have no experience.
2. I am building new relationships with other groups within my company by working on these projects.

I am an SLA member who has always worked in a “nontraditional” library position, but I have strongly associated myself with the information professionals in SLA. As we move into the future, we should remember to challenge ourselves by learning about new ideas to keep our profession “agile”.

Liz Wallach has worked at BNA for 22 years in various research positions, most recently as a Manager of Special Projects. She has been a member of SLA for almost that long, since completing her M.S.L.S. at Catholic University.

Jill Blaemers,  San Diego Chapter Director; Taxonomy and Social Science Divisions

Cindy Romaine has challenged us each to become future-ready, that is, to prepare ourselves for our desired future. In considering how I want to respond to that challenge, I am reminded of a conversation I had many years ago, with an executive at the company I worked for at the time. He asked me where I wanted to be in five years. The smart, albeit cliché, response would have been to tell him that I wanted to be in his job in three years, but, nope, that’s not how I think. Instead, I told him that, in looking ahead, what I saw was a continuing evolution in how we organize, disseminate, and access information, and that our roles in it were going to need to evolve as well; I wanted to contribute to figuring the whole scheme out. Staking a claim to one particular route to the future wasn’t to me then, and it isn’t now, a viable option for an individual or a company.

We each sit in the midst of a constantly changing reality that is the result, at any given instant of time, of a myriad of individual, social unit, and societal-level decisions, small and momentous, all influenced by factors in the natural world. Not to be trite, but change is endemic to the human condition, so to be future-ready, we need to be eyes wide open to its fact and its force.  What we need to focus on is our contribution, as information professionals, to creating whatever that future looks like, and to be ready for that requires a certain mindset, attitude, and action, the point Cindy makes.

To me, being future-ready means many things. Personally and professionally, the minimum requirements are resilience and adaptability. Future-ready means bringing my skills of assessment and analysis to the status quo, as well as skepticism to calls for change for change’s sake and speed for speed’s sake. It means being ready and willing to get my hands dirty today with the hard work of implementing change that makes sense for tomorrow, at the same time scanning and evaluating the external environment for opportunities and threats, all with an eye on the horizon. It means a personal and professional commitment to lifelong learning and the incredibly lofty, yet so critical, goal of achieving an information-literate society in a world where information is seemingly available to everyone while, at the same time, a digital divide persists. Fundamentally, it means a laser focus on doing my best to help connect users with authoritative, accessible, actionable information.

Jill Blaemers is an information industry veteran, currently working independently providing consulting services related to product development of electronic academic reference databases and assessment of user needs and market conditions/opportunities. She serves as a Director on the Board of SLA – San Diego, and is a member of the SLA Social Science and Taxonomy Divisions.

by Cindy Hill , Multiple Chapters and Divisions

Some of my best memories of elementary school are of playground time, before, during and after class. My friends and I would race to the jungle gym, running to our favorite spot, the parallel bar, where we would spend wonderful hours (at least it felt like hours) hanging from bent knees and then start spinning around and around. When we found the just perfect moment, we would let go, flying up into the air and then landing as far away as momentum and our bodies would take us. While I’m pretty sure we knew we could get hurt (we landed on tan bark, not rubber mats) we also were fearless, physically agile and willing to take risks.

One aspect of being Future Ready is to take that youthful fearlessness and incorporate it into our work environment, especially when we are considering starting something new or changing an existing service. Too often it’s difficult to start something new for many reasons. Often there’s the fear of failure, lack of resources, concern about being able to provide the service to everyone, or not enough funding. Considering a new service or providing a new resource, but not sure how it will be received? One way to test its viability is to launch it as a pilot using the 3Ss + 1S more model, rather than a full-scale entity. You won’t find this model in any management or text book as a former executive VP at Sun Microsystems created it. The 3Ss + 1S more model stands for:

• Start small
• Be highly successful
• Make it scalable
• And keep statistics (aka metrics)

Start small: Create the big vision and then break it into smaller components. One way to start small is to limit the new service or resource to a specific group. Can it be introduced to a particular segment of your audience rather than the entire organization? By choosing a group that wants or needs the new service or resource, you are already working with a receptive audience, one that will give useful and constructive advice and observations and will be willing to work out any kinks with you. Which group would benefit most from being a “first adopter”? Would they then be your advocates and supporters?

Be highly successful: Plan for success by defining what success looks like. Is success having a specific group use it and want it to continue? Does success mean that the technology is working seamlessly? Or is success having the new resource embedded into the daily workflow of your users? By defining success before the initiative is launched, you will know when you have reached it.

Make it scalable: A highly successful initiative is one that can grow to meet the demands of potential users. Is there enough staff, funding, technological support and/or support from your internal or external partners as the demand expands? Is there a plan to acquire the needed resources in order to scale?

Keep statistics: Statistics should be both quantifiable and qualitative. How many people are using the new service or resource? How are they using it? What value is it adding to their productivity? What stories are they telling you about its value? Metrics provide the foundation for building a rationale to continue or scale the initiative.

With limited budgets, staff and resources, it’s often daunting to take a risk in changing a process, launching a new service, or introducing a new resource. Think back to your childhood days of playing, experimenting with new techniques, and being fearless and then bring those agile aspects into your daily life. As Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media and innovator recommends, “Try fast, fail fast, keep trying and never give up.”

Cindy Hill is the manager of the Research Library at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She’s a past president of SLA and is currently chairing the 2012 Conference Planning Council. She is a newly selected Commissioner for the Los Altos Public Library and is a part-time faculty member at San Jose State University.  Cindy can be reached at cindyvhill@yahoo.com, tweets @cindyhill and can be found on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/cindyvhill. She’s currently working on her latest 3S + 1S initiative.

by Allan Foster, Europe Chapter and Business & Finance Division

For more years than I care to remember I have been charting developments in business information use through an annual survey of information managers. This is the Business Information Survey published each March in Sage’s quarterly journal Business Information Review. The focus of the Survey has changed over time, from a concentration on sources of information to key issues in information management.

The methodology has also changed, from an open, widely distributed questionnaire to a series of in-depth interviews with a small number of senior corporate information managers. These are mainly based in the UK but many work for global businesses and have responsibilities for international services. If I was being pretentious(!) I would describe it now as almost ‘ethnographic’, a series of ongoing conversations with trusted colleagues, trying to chart year on year changes in their services, roles within their organisations and strategic priorities. It has only been possible to do this and to get brutal honesty from respondents by honouring a rule of strict confidence and aggregating results so as to avoid disclosing any identities. Most but not all respondents are involved in the Survey each year. In it’s 21^st year, the 2011 Survey¹ included seventeen of the interviewees from the previous year whilst another four were new participants.

Although the respondents represent a range of corporate information, library & research services, across industrial sectors and of varying sizes, I claim no statistical representativeness whatsoever for the Survey. But, given the seniority and frankness of the respondents, the findings provide a rich narrative of current practice and future intentions. It’s the latter which I’m concentrating on here as a contribution to the ‘Future Ready’ discussion.

Whilst massive turbulence in the business and financial environment is the new norm and technologies change so fast, the Survey results suggest that the crucial ‘future ready’ attitudes and skills in the corporate information scene are and will be in the next five years pretty much the same as those exhibited in successful information services now. This may be a disappointment to the ‘everything is changing’ lobby who are looking for new magic bullets and a cookbook formula to succeed in the corporate information/knowledge management world.

The key approaches and skills that define successful information management, now and in the next few years, amongst the 2011 Survey group of senior professionals, are:

1. Access to, and a good relationship with, senior executives, preferably at board level.
2. ‘Business strategy & culture fit’ – the ability to develop the information service in harmony with the company’s strategic objectives and organisational culture.
3. Developing a shrewd political instinct, having sensitive antennae amongst users and senior managers and being adaptive in consequence.
4. Financial nous – contributing to the increased profitability of the company, streamlining processes and services, reducing costs.
5. The ability to work globally with all that this implies – building alliances, harmonising & integrating services – whilst understanding different cultural and business practices which shape the environment.
6. Develop hard nosed negotiation skills with content vendors. And getting harder.
7. Responding to the growing emphasis on compliance work.
8. Managing capacity & workload, with flexibility and responsiveness.
9. Ensuring that your information/research/knowledge staff are embedded within business project and work teams.
10. Continuing to look dispassionately at alternative organisational and delivery models including outsourcing and off-shoring.
11. Embracing and handling internal ‘know-how’ as well as external data.
12. Enhancing knowledge management skills (note small rather than capitalised ‘KM’) – knowledge sharing, capturing tacit knowledge, using stories, applying appropriate technologies.
13. Use social media when appropriate. A number of respondents are somewhat sceptical of the business case for such deployment in terms of their information and research services.
14. More attention should be given to measuring the impact of the information services (including outsourcing/off-shoring), through ROI and other metrics.
15. New IT systems should be implemented in line with technological opportunities and trends but most of all to improve access to content and cost-effectiveness of services.
16. IS/KM staffing – the most important internal resource of all. Improve communications, provide development opportunities, undertake succession planning.
17. There’s no substitute for persistence and hard work.

1. These and other issues are developed much more fully in “Let’s save the company money” – the new orthodoxy. The Business Information Survey 2011. Business Information Review 28 (1), March 2011.

—————–—————–

Allan Foster (allan.foster@gmail.com) is an information industry consultant and writer, previously Director of Information Services at Keele University and a senior information manager at Manchester Business School, Lancashire Polytechnic, Sheffield Polytechnic and the British Institute of Management. He presented these findings at an SLA Europe session, Is your information service ‘Future Ready’?, in Manchester on 22^nd March 2011.

by Paul T. Jackson, Trescott Research

© March, 2011

“People are resilient because they have to be…although the scars never disappear totally.”

By the time Naisbitt came out with his book Megatrends 2000 wherein he said people would likely have 4 or 5 careers, I was already on my sixth career track. Here are some lessons about being flexible and adaptable and future ready from those six careers.

Lesson 1:  Be open to new possibilities.

Over time I’ve experienced many successful endeavors simply by allowing them to happen and doing my best at the tasks given.

Without a job, and while attending a performance of the Royal Ballet of England in Detroit, I was standing next to an older gentleman.  We found we had mutual friends and interests, and I was invited to a late night dinner with him. Our dinner conversation led me to my library career under Kurtz Myers, head of the Detroit Public Library Music Department.

Years later, after my university position ended, I went to the office supply store to get some copy paper for my old wet copier.  The proprietor showed me the new 3M dry toner copier, and after looking at the copy sample, I exclaimed, “Wow, I could sell this!”  The proprietor said, “You’re on. When can you start?” Thus started a career of selling office supply and machines; helping people organize their files and paper processes. This knowledge and work eventually brought me to learning and selling computers and a partnership with a computer firm helping build databases for companies and organizations.

In all of these positions I was using all of my knowledge and past experience in libraries, music publishing, research, writing, and office supply and able to do a superior performance because of it.

Lesson 2:  Be Inquisitive and ask questions.   It can lead to new ventures.

In undergraduate school, a philosophy professor had told me, “Solutions start with questions.”

At library school I felt there was a need for an organization whose archives of recorded sound could come together to share information.  I wrote and asked the curator of the Ford Museum collection, Frank Davis, what it would take to get these and other archivists together. His response was, “First, we have to have a meeting.”  This led to several meetings including an exploratory one with 22 librarians and archivists attending. They represented the largest collections of recordings in the United States.  We met in June of 1965 at Greenfield Village/Ford Museum after the American Library Association conference in Detroit.  We met again at Syracuse University, and there, in 1966, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) was founded with over 40 people attending, representing not only U.S. collections and archives, but also Canadian broadcasting and the United Nations sound recording libraries.  ARSC ( http://arsc-audio.org/ ) is now in its 45th year of existence. It only takes a question, and action, to start something significant.

Lesson 3: Give Responsibility; Take Responsibility

As a supervisor it is your job, your responsibility, to help those you supervise. This includes mentoring and developing your staff. You need to be able to teach them to take over your job, or at least keep the place operational if you are not there; no one should feel threatened by this.  It is making things better, even people.

I gave inmates responsibility to operate their prison library and law library.  They came back with ideas, they helped with grant writing, they improved services, and they took turns running the classes on writing business plans, legal research, and helping in the reading lab.  I helped train them on computers. The Corrections Accreditation Commission reported twice, our library “second to none [in the nation]” over the 8 plus years I was Director. Great things happen to your staff and their self-esteem when they have responsibility.

Lesson 4: Focus on problems–It’s not about you or me.

Someone on staff takes credit for your idea—get over it!

You have to change to smaller space—get over it!

Someone damages your ego—get over it!

Your library closes—get over it!

None of these things are important to the business of solving problems for the employer or customers.  I’ve survived all these things and in the end found solving problems was more important than who got credit. The programs I’ve helped build have survived, which to me is vastly more important.

At the music publishing group, TRO, Inc. representing over 32 publishers in 18 countries, the executives were often arguing, but once the problem was solved or the action agreed upon and discharged, they would be seen heading out the door for lunch together.

Remembering what you learned makes you so much more valuable for the next job.  Get over the closing and go on. Solving problems for the company, the employees, the customers, is the mission of every employee. This is what is remembered.

Lesson 5:  Think altruistically about leaving!

Leave something better than expected.

Growing up, my mother taught us we were to leave things better. I’m not rich financially. My career didn’t follow a well thought out plan.  It wasn’t something I started out to do.  Along the way I created new libraries, new businesses, and helped establish a national association.  I count myself a success.  When you get done, (do we ever get done?) by being resilient and practicing the lessons, you too can say, “I did good.”

Two of my favorite quotes:

“Remember, to get anything done, you first have to start.”

“The one who says it can’t be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.”

Mr. Jackson is an Information Specialist. A retired Special Librarian in Academic, Public, Corporate, and Prison libraries, he has taught research to Ph.D. candidates, and published a wide variety of articles. He is currently Editor of Plateau Area Writers Association’s Quarterly and anthology series, Contrasts. He is a member of several musical ensembles and volunteers as church librarian.  His career positions are recorded in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who International, and a profile at his web site: www.trescottresearch.com

by Dianna Roberts, Australia and New Zealand Chapter, Transportation Division

Our Information Centre has always been well-positioned in the company especially as our two most recent Chief Executives had wives who were librarians. We now have a new, young and dynamic CE with a non-librarian wife and who is making lots of changes, all of which I support, but like many of you I suffer from what I refer to as ‘librarians’ paranoia,” i.e. the fear of being seen as irrelevant and potentially disposable.

My immediate manager has been asking questions which were making me feel nervous, such as “what would it cost the company NOT to have the Information Centre?”, but I knew I’d done all I could to present a positive image with glowing feedback and value statements that proved our worth, and that any outcome was probably now beyond my control. So this morning I was very pleasantly surprised (almost shocked!) to be told that the company wants us to move beyond being viewed as “the library” and to take on a more active role of Information Management with ownership of functions such as EDRMS, e-learning, KM and anything else I can suggest.

We currently have a staff of only 2.5 FTE who serving a population of 2,500 in four different countries. Our main focus has been on indepth research, document supply and alerting services so taking on these wider roles will mean expanding our staff and learning new skills. It will also provide us with more authoritative position in the company.

What an exciting year it is going to be.

Dianna Roberts is the Manager of the Information Centre at Opus International Consultants Ltd.

by John Digilio, Chicago Chapter, Legal Division Chair

Nervous energy.  It is everywhere these days.  It is that feeling in the pit of your stomach or at the back of your mind that something might not be quite right.  As discussions on the future of libraries become more pressing, there is nervous energy.  As we continue to reel from the library closings and job losses that seemed to gain momentum during the recent global economic crisis, there is nervous energy.  In fact, there is so much nervous energy in our industry these days that I dare say it is palpable to each of us as library and information professionals.  The good news is that we have an important choice to make.  We can let this energy weigh heavily upon us and drag us down or we can choose to harness and channel it in ways that make us truly future ready.

What is gripping so many in our industry these days is nothing less than a real and warranted fear of the unknown.  What is to become of libraries and librarians in a world that is increasingly dominated by virtual interaction, technological interfaces, and instant electronic gratification?  It is an almost overwhelming contemplation.  It is also a necessary one.  In his excellent series on management skills, The Leadership Pickles, Bob Pharrell talks about the negative impact this fear of the unknown can have on workers and productivity.  If left unchecked, it can sap some of most integral human commodities: enthusiasm, confidence and integrity.  In his course, Pharrell urges managers to meet this fear of the unknown head on.  As a librarian, I believe this is not only sound advice for managers but an urgent call to action for each one of us, regardless of level or title.  As the old adage goes, “When life hands you lemons . . . “.

I believe that when it comes to the future of libraries and librarians, the tech-laden world of tomorrow is still very much our oyster.  There are plenty of pearls to be had and nobody – I repeat, NOBODY – knows how to find them better than we.  The trick is to not let nervous energy and fear of the unknown drag us down in our pursuit.  When we are having these vital discussions in our meetings with colleagues, on discussion boards, and with our bosses and employers, we have to come to the table prepared.  I personally recommend a three-pronged attack.  Take that nervous energy by the horns and channel it into optimism, activism, and creativity.  If you can do that, tomorrow and all of its unknowns will not know what hit them.  Note that I am not saying this will be easy.  I am saying it is essential.  Here’s the breakdown:

by Noël Kopriva, Pittsburgh Chapter, Food, Agriculture & Nutrition Division

Lead? Me? When I was asked to run for Chair-Elect of the Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition Division (FAN) after only a few years as a member, I couldn’t help saying to myself: “I don’t know what I’m doing yet!” Now, nearly a year later, I’m reflecting on the experience of learning to lead.

When I was asked to run for Chair-Elect, I had qualms about my inexperience, both as a FAN member and as a librarian, but those were not my only doubts: I was convinced that I was temperamentally unsuited to a leadership position. I like to listen to people and encourage them, but I’m not fond of giving directions; that is to say, I unconsciously equated leadership with bossiness.  As I thought about FAN and the people I knew in leadership positions, however, I realized my experiences with the division had actually shown me that leaders do not “boss” if they want to be effective. Good leaders listen well, they encourage you to play to your strengths, and they help you to learn from failure. These are all qualities I wanted to cultivate as a librarian and as a leader, so I ran for Chair-Elect and got the position.

In my son’s favorite episode of The Backyardigans, called “Super Team Awesome,” one of the characters is a tour guide without super powers. Not to worry: “You have the gift of leading people,” Tyrone the Tour Guide’s friends tell him. “You’re a real superhero!” And it’s true: Tyrone gently leads his team of certified superheroes through an obstacle maze of sticky bacteria, slippery rocks, and active volcanoes to help them save the earth.  His is a perfect example of servant leadership, which is characterized, according to Fillipa Manulo (2007), by “the desire to serve authentically and with purpose (par 36),” not by a desire for power or control. It’s an example I aim to follow each day as I communicate, plan, and organize in the virtual world with my colleagues in FAN and in real life as a subject librarian and instruction coordinator. In either context, I see my primary mission as one of empowerment—helping students to become lifelong learners, helping faculty to succeed in their research, helping colleagues obtain access to the professional development tools they need to do their jobs effectively.

The desire to serve, the desire to lead: to do both effectively, we must be future ready. We need to think not only in terms of our skill sets, whose currency we anxiously monitor, but in terms of our openness to change, our commitment to thoughtful stewardship of our resources (Anzalone, 2007, par. 30), and to a realistic assessment of our ability to be effective in innumerable environments and platforms. If we do these things, we will not only be ready for the future ourselves, we can show others the way.

Since 2007, Noël Kopriva has been the Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Design Librarian at West Virginia University Libraries; since 2008, she has served as the Instruction Coordinator for Evansdale Library. Prior to her career as a librarian, Noël worked as a college writing instructor and in the production end of medical and educational publishing. She holds a BA & an MA in English, and an MLS, all from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

References

Anzalone, F. (2007). Servant leadership: a new model for law library leaders. Law Library Journal, 99(4), 793-812. http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_journal.asp.

Berstein, AD, Burgess, J., Gray, S (Writers) & Kim, D (Director). (2010). Super team awesome. In Janice M. Jacobs (Producer), The Backyardigans. New York, NY: NickJr.