by Jan Sykes, President, Information Management Services (Illinois Chapter, Knowledge Management and Leadership & Management Divisions)

We’ve seen earlier Future Ready posts recommending that information and knowledge professionals apply principles of design to our work. This idea was reinforced this week in a keynote presentation at the ILA (Illinois Library Association) conference by Duane Bray of the design firm IDEO. He noted that they often found that people in the trenches have some of the best insights into user behaviors, emerging trends and new ways of working. Are we, as information professionals, actively observing and engaging our colleagues in conversations that help us identify emerging practices and opportunities? Or, do we use our extremely busy schedules and full work load as justification to continue our “business as usual” mode? In order to develop new and creative, user-centered ways of making business information readily available to our clients, our antennae must be sensitive to changing signals in our environment.

Mr. Bray described several emerging behaviors they have identified in recent work in the education and healthcare sectors including: human multitasking, mediated conversations (engagement and reliance on input from our social network), melding of online and offline worlds, and leveraging of collective intelligence (ratings and commentary offered by others across a range of products and services, e.g., YELP reviews). Most of us would probably acknowledge seeing these same behaviors. The challenge is to transition our mindset and our service models to incorporate this reality. It is critical for us to do so to remain relevant and competitive. While we may feel we are caught up in whirlwinds of change, I like the concept of small-scale, rapid prototyping to test new services or products within our control and within our respective communities. In collaboration with diverse small groups of clients and colleagues, new tools, technologies, and resources can be quickly tested. Failure on a small scale is an inexpensive learning experience and helps us refocus our planning and energy in a direction that is likely to have a more positive outcome. Successful prototyping lays the groundwork (and business case) for an expanded implementation. More importantly, such work helps us move with added confidence into the future.

Jan Sykes has over 20 years experience in the information industry. Currently, she leads Information Management Services, Inc., an independent consultancy.  Her work is focused on information and knowledge management projects, including needs assessments, content portfolio reviews, contract negotiations and strategic planning activities. Prior to beginning her own consulting firm, Jan was Senior Director of Client Services Consulting for Knight-Ridder Information, Inc.

Jan is active in SLA: she was president of the IL chapter in 2002 and chaired the Association Nominating Committee in 2005. She served on the Board of KM-Chicago and also on the Board of Trustees for the public library in her community.

by Michael D. McDonald, Dr. P.H.

It can be argued that libraries have their origins in the swarm behavior of individuals and groups acquiring and sharing cultural artefacts (e.g., pictographs, books) as the fundamental repositories of knowledge within a community and the broader society. Librarians have played a key role in the founding and differentiation of America at its origins. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, for example, played key roles in deepening and broadening the tradition of knowledge sharing within the early United States.

Thomas Jefferson saw public education and acquisition of knowledge as one of the key cornerstones of a free republic. As a result, he founded the University of Virginia and the Library of Congress with the sharing of his own extensive library. Ben Franklin, in holding a similar ideal for knowledge sharing, formed the first social libraries in the late 1700s in Philadelphia, which could be described as perhaps the first public libraries in the United States.

Fast forward — the United States, in the early 21st century, is a global society with its knowledge-based transactions touching billions of lives a day. Knowledge sharing is now more a phenomenon of the world wide web and social media than of static collections of books alone. As a result, library science is fusing with knowledge science, the cognitive sciences, and the sciences of complexity, which now have less to do with human/book interactions than human/information system interactions. As a result, librarians are not only influencing the interactions between individuals and the knowledge source, but also how the knowledge of populations shapes collective intelligence and its impact on individual behaviors, and collective behavior.

Like the biologist of the 21st century, who must think not only of germs, plants, and animals but also about DNA and genes, the librarian of the 21st century must also now consider memes and memeplexes — the fundamental artefacts of science and culture and how they replicate and inform behavior, social process, and social structure. In so doing, the 21st century librarian, thinking back from the ultimate impact of their craft, has enormous power in shaping the trajectory of individuals and populations influenced by the knowledge management systems librarians architect and manage. In a world of human populations rapidly exceeding the carrying capacity of their ecosystems globally leading to food insecurity, energy crisis, water crisis, social conflict, and war, the librarian’s effective shaping of knowledge management systems becomes mission critical.

Librarians in this context have enormous power in guiding the great transformation of social ecologies in the U.S. and around the world toward resilience and sustainability. In this context, the work of librarians makes a strategic difference in humanity’s epic struggle between mass collapses of populations and humanity’s abilities to thrive under rapidly changing conditions. It is no longer just the shaping of knowledge that the 21st century librarian must attend to, but the kindling of wisdom to anticipate changing conditions, collectively transforming wise decisions into unity of effort across large populations — to collaboratively shape and live within resilient and sustainable social ecologies compatible with healthy biomes; this is the power and the craft of librarians today facing the strategic challenges of their communities, the United States, and the future of our collective humanity globally.

Dr. Michael D. McDonald is director of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure Initiative and the chief architect of the U.S. Resilience System. Dr. McDonald has led several large PanFlu exercises and provided testimony to the Congressional Budget Office on key weaknesses of current U.S. pandemic flu policy. He has been an early voice for global, real-time, transparent biosurveillance systems and building infrastructures supporting situational awareness and verifiable resilience at the household, neighborhood and community levels. Dr. McDonald chaired the Genomics and Bioinformatics working group and was co-founder of the Bioterrorism working group of IEEE. Dr. McDonald does research in memetics and biosecurity in association with several universities and government agencies and has been co-principal investigator with the Centers for Disease Control on the Psychosocial Dimensions of BioSecurity Initiative. He is Principal Investigator on the Global Resilience System testbed and is currently the President and CEO of Global Health Initiatives, Inc. He is deeply involved in the prevention and management of large-scale social crises, such as through his work in Haiti, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States.

On October 20, Dr. Michael D. McDonald will engage a discourse on the social media, intelligent social networks, information sharing environments, and Resilience Systems, as some of the fundamental tools of strategically oriented librarians embracing the full power and responsibilities of the professions. You may join this in person or via simulcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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