San Diego, California is home of beautiful weather, spectacular beaches- and a group of highly motivated, driven and future-ready information professionals. The SLA-San Diego Chapter is proud to join in the conversation with our SLA peers about what it means to be Future Ready.  Our San Diego membership boasts a wide range of professional experience and expertise, and we hope that you find our contributions to the FutureReady365 blog to be both thought-provoking and useful!

by Britt Mueller, San Diego Chapter, Business & Finance, Engineering, and Leadership & Management Divisions

Years ago I was told a third hand story that had a huge impact on how I thought about my career and defined success in my work. In essence, it was one of the best pieces of advice that I have been given to make me “future ready.”

The story was about a person in a large company who was working on a project with a lot of visibility. Quite a few very bright and highly competent people were on the project and worked tirelessly on it for several months. They had great communication skills and worked effectively as a team but in the end the project did not fulfill the objectives that were laid out and failed to impress senior executives. When discussing the project with an executive, the lead described the significant teamwork, the long nights, and how hard people had worked. The executive listened to the project leader and simply said, “You are confusing effort with results.”

Although I was hearing this story third or fourth hand, the clarity and simplicity of this statement rang true. The fact that it came from someone who was in a high level position was also critical in that it clearly delineated what was important to leaders. Getting results counts – both personally in terms of what I deliver as an individual and also for the Library as an entity within the larger organization. I can develop personal and professional skills, my team can work hard, we can be busy – but in the end gaining and developing skills or trying hard is meaningless if you cannot produce results that matter.

I think there is a lot that library and information professionals can learn from this statement. I have attended many conferences, communicated with peers, read our literature over more years than I would wish to admit and I am often disheartened by the emphasis with which we work to define ourselves. I am sure many people would agree that they cannot attend a library conference without some mention by attendees of how nice a group of people we are, that we need to position ourselves for the future and develop new skills, or the oft cited lament on how people outside our profession don’t understand us and we have to get better at communicating our value. These are all good and often true observations in and of themselves, but they should never be how we define our success or our ability to be meaningful. These are attributes, tools and approaches that should help us do the final necessary step – get results that matter to our organizations, our leaders, and our clients.

I personally use the idea of results over effort to define what I work on, what strategic initiatives the organization I manage focuses on, and to communicate value to my leaders. It also requires me to be my own worst critic – to look for continued opportunity to produce results that matter. The outcome of focusing on results creates the best use of resources, assures that the work I do is meaningful and important, and positions the Library as a critical and necessary service – not a nice to have. Never confusing effort with results actually creates outcomes (or results) that we can all consider successes including recognition, support, resources, and growth as we position ourselves, our libraries and information centers as critical to the success of any organization.

Currently serving as President of the SLA San Diego Chapter, Britt Mueller is the Sr. Director of Qualcomm’s Library & Information Services department. Serving a global employee population of over 20,000 people, the Qualcomm Library provides just-in-time information, research and analysis to enable employees to increase performance and productivity for competitive advantage.

Howdy from the beautiful Rocky Mountains! The Rocky Mountain chapter of SLA is thrilled to contribute this week’s FutureReady365 posts. We are a small, diverse community of 150+ members spread across a four-state region (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and South Dakota). We have a medley of posts from public school, government, higher education and independent professionals that we hope will prompt conversations, comments and thoughts on being future ready. Happy reading!

These days there is lots of talk about collaboration. I’m a believer as all my best ideas come from engaging in life’s experiences by listening, learning and discussing with others; and reading constantly.

This is how I developed cooperative intelligence www.thecisource.com/coopintel in 2004. I learned that many in competitive intelligence, my professional angle, are frustrated since their ideas and insight either don’t get shared with decision-makers or are ignored. We often blame management for this behavior, when it’s up to us to be heard and listened to. You need to figure out how to earn the respect of managers individually—and over time they will listen and engage.

The core attitude is cooperation, in that you show a willingness to give to others without expecting something in return. There are 3 interrelated behaviors in cooperative intelligence: Leadership, Connection and Communication.

Cooperative Leadership: While info pros and librarians usually don’t hold traditional leadership positions, we can be leaders by doing excellent work, which contains a proactive, future looking element. It is easy for us to become mired in the reactive detail of projects.

Likewise, we need to stand up for what we believe. Sometimes we are asked to research topics or use research methodologies which we think are unethical, and we have to say NO! We also need to share information and analysis that our management won’t like. It’s our job, and cooperatively we can gently, but firmly share what we learn.

Cooperative Connection: Cooperative connectors value everyone we meet. We make a point of making people feel important by listening and staying in touch. We make the person we are speaking to feel like s/he is the only person that matters, even when surrounded by hundreds at the SLA Annual Conference, for example!

Cooperative connectors share specific information only with those who might value it. Sharing with those who don’t care is rude. Take the time to identify who will appreciate what you produce. Cooperative connectors also keep their contacts up to date and add new people to their distribution lists in the areas they value.

Cooperative Communication: One way to be a cooperative communicator is to be a good listener, to observe, engage and ask good questions. Notice what people choose not to share or when their body action doesn’t jive with their words. Librarians are trained to be good listeners so have a competitive advantage over most other professions. However, do we project a cooperative attitude? Take the next step and find out how out how your customers want to be communicated with, their areas of need as well as their expertise. In our quest to be helpful, we often forget that people like to be asked about what they know.

Help your company be future ready by sharing your knowledge cooperatively. Your management team needs your insight, and you need to figure out how to reach them cooperatively!

Ellen Naylor is the owner of The Business Intelligence Source (http://www.thecisource.com). Read more of her insights at http://cooperativeintelligenceblog.com. She is a member of the Rocky Mountain SLA team.

Note: This blog builds on Ellen’s January FR blog.

Hello from the nation’s capital!  DC/SLA is excited to be contributing all of this week’s FutureReady365 posts (thanks to our future-thinking Communications Secretary, Chris Vestal).  We are a diverse community of 800+ information professionals, with members from D.C., Maryland, Virginia, as well as 30 other U.S. states and 12 countries.  You’ll see this diversity reflected in the range of future ready ideas presented in posts throughout the week.  We hope our posts will spark some thought and conversation and, of course, your comments. Most of all, we want to help keep the spark of the FutureReady blog alive  – a spark that’s become a fire, gathering us around it to brainstorm our way into the future. — Mary Talley, DC/SLA President (2011)

by Laura Soto-Barra, Washington, DC Chapter, News Division

Three years ago, I attended a presentation at the Knight Digital Media Center; Prof. Ernest J. Wilson III, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California welcomed us, NPR leaders attending a seminar in his campus on planning our digital future. Dean Wilson’s main idea was to encourage us to prepare for the future by understanding the digital environment and transform ourselves to accept the disruption. It was then that I learned that that there is a capacity gap in e-leadership that needs to be closed. He said e-leaders are the innovators and early adopters that spread new technologies in their communities and organizations and that e-leaders are scarce. According to Dean Wilson, it is not easy to find the right kind of talent to provide e-leadership and he lists the competencies needed in this new environment as SAKE: Skills, Attitude, Knowledge and Experience.

Translating these competencies for the library field, I believe that there is enough talent among information professionals that makes us e-leaders in our organizations; I’m afraid that we have not been able to unleash that talent because we don’t want to fail or because we don’t have enough confidence in our skills. In this digital workplace there is space for failure. Do a search on “failure:” and you will see how much these days people are talking about it. “Fail fast,” they say and you will learn. Let’s take a look at SAKE.

For Future Ready, we need communications Skills that go beyond a reference transaction or a training session; we need to share ideas and concepts and listen and be able to change our behavior after capturing what we have heard. Librarians know how to do this but we need more flexibility in our concepts. How many times do we alter our procedures when a new librarian arrives in the team and suggests new ideas? We need political skills to navigate an organization to put words into action. This is what we have heard from Steve Abram for decades: work without a desk and walk and talk; Laurence Pruzak told us once in an SLA conference, that librarians engender trust and that we should take advantage of that talent by talking to people.

The Attitudes competence Dean Wilson describes is the description of a librarian: we are passionate, have empathy, our intellectual curiosity has no limits and we know about tenacity in face of opposition and failure; we are constantly asking for inclusion. But something difficult for us is to have high tolerance for ambiguity. Our training is based on rigid concepts and our practices demand consistent accuracy and rigor in applying rules and standards. Can we keep standards and accept ambiguity? We have to take risks and accept that all around us, the environment is inconsistent, contradictory, unstructured and unexpected.

Our professional training gives us Knowledge: we know theories and concepts and have a deep understanding of how to translate and migrate manual practices to digital workflows. We have adopted technologies for decades but now everyone searches, tags content and creates metadata. Go beyond the comfortable and understand web development. Continue traveling as a hobby and participate in multicultural networks that allow you to know people different than you. Cultivate networks outside your library world and apply the new knowledge in your library.

Finally Dean Wilson mentions Experience as a requirement to fill the capacity gap; this experience is obtained by working in different environments, organizations and settings. We should not apply ourselves the label: “academic,” “legal,” “public,” “special”; we are information professionals whose training is transferable. Experience is obtained by taking risks, by moving to work in different cities and different organizations.

If you are a library manager you have tools to prepare your staff to be Future Ready. Prepare budgets that allow travel so that your staff go to conferences and get training; sacrifice collections or furniture for your staff’s training; be creative, inclusive and transparent by designing meaningful jobs that reflect your team’s skills and give them autonomy to modify your practices. Predicate and advocate for SAKE and read John Berry’s article who recommends seeking out the new librarians. That column impressed me and I understood that the new librarians are better prepared than me to close the capacity gaps in e-leadership in the very near future.

LS-B is NPR’s Senior Librarian. She is a Chilean-Canadian-American librarian who has worked in many library settings. She has first hand experience in that information science skills are transferable and highly valuable, that libraries are libraries are libraries, and that you have to re-locate to find the best jobs. Her last two jobs have been in newspapers in Jacksonville, Florida and in Syracuse, New York; in both newsrooms –as well as at NPR–she worked with highly competent and smart librarians, obtained strong management support, job satisfaction and professional rewards.

by Risa Sacks

“Future ready” for me has always been about discovering, learning and using the best tools for finding information wherever it lives, and connecting to the ‘information holders.’

Primary Research

I specialize in “Primary Research” – finding answers that don’t already appear online. My job ranges from interviewing experts to learn the information in their heads, to digging in archives for some obscure piece of paper. While the initial search is to find what answers are available online, the next level of online search focuses on new ‘sources’ for information and how to reach them.

Some examples of being ‘future ready’ over the past few years include finding information in the many new places it lives, using new tools to reach out to the experts identified, and communicating with them in the manner they most prefer.

Finding information where it lives

We all know that long gone are the days where all we had to consider were printed materials. To identify people who might fill in the blanks, expand information found online, clarify, add levels of richness and nuance, I now need to search the blogosphere, tweets, video and audio feeds, power point presentations, discussion boards and specialty groups to name a few of the places information now ‘lives.’ An Addictomatic search (www.Addictomatic.com) brings information from Twitter, Bing News, Google Blog Search, Truveo Video Search, YouTube, Flickr, Blinkx Mainstream Vid News; Wikio, Twingly Blog Search, Yahoo Web Search, Friendfeed and Ask.com News…you get the idea.

Posting a request on specialty groups within LinkedIn, Google, etc., and discussion lists in SLA, BusLib, Association of Independent Information Professionals (aiip.org) brings help and recommendations from targeted convocations of experts – whether it’s green tech or durable medical equipment sales. And all in very real time.

Seeing a YouTube video of a Chief Medical Officer helps me evaluate that he comes across as believable, caring, conscientious and competent – just what I’d want in recommending an expert witness. Providing the video link to the law firm clients also helps their selection process.

A LinkedIn search can find me telecommunications experts from Nepal to Namibia, or coal mining maintenance personnel within 25 miles of the zip code of a specific mine in Montana.

Reaching out to experts and sources

Once I’ve identified possible experts, new tools help reach out to them. Anything that provides a point of connection, as opposed to a completely cold contact, is useful.

Though I have a number of issues with LinkedIn and it’s far from perfect, I’ll use it for several examples. Recently posting requests to LinkedIn Groups for Durable Medical Equipment and Hospital Infection Control not only identified experts, but also provided entrees – “tell him I sent you”, “I’ve been in the field for 20 years – drop me a note if I can help” and “feel free to give me a call.”

With LinkedIn, if I link to 10 people and each of them has 50 connections, I have second level connections to 500 people, and if each of those have 50 connections, all of a sudden, my universe of third level connections is 25,000 strong. I can contact them using ‘inMail’ or just mentioning that we are LinkedIn connections seems to provide a level of legitimacy to my request.

Communicating

For ongoing and in-depth communications, we can Skype, text, video conference, and webX, as well as using the trusty traditional telephone. The world is totally mobile, so talking from airports or the beach is common. With my ‘smart device’ I can snap and send a picture or video of the shack that’s the supposed ‘branch office’ of the potential merger partner, or show clients close ups of documents that I find on a distant site. 

One World……Many stories…Future Ready

While I don’t know what the future will bring, I know it will include new tools to help identify relevant people, new ways to contact them and new methods for starting and continuing meaningful communication with them. 

In today’s world, information is constantly expanding – at the same time we are more connected than ever. A fruit seller in Tunisia can spark a revolution across a region. A doctor at the Mayo clinic may help diagnose a child in a remote African region. Every day we see increased evidence of the global interconnectedness of economies and lives. Including a variety of people and viewpoints is critical for us to provide more complete answers. So as information professionals, ‘future ready’ will help us continue to increase our ‘range’ and ‘grasp’ as we keep on reaching out.

Risa Sacks is a freelance researcher who provides primary research services to companies, research departments and other researchers. She can be reached at risa@risasacks.com, or, of course, by phone at 508 852-8686.

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.

by Aimee Babcock-Ellis, Washington, DC Chapter, Advertising & Marketing, Chemistry, and Government Information Divisions

When I first started as a Graduate Assistant at the University of Maryland my supervisor, Mr. Allan Rough, told me about his first job as a librarian and why it was such a good learning experience for him. The manager who ran the school that he worked at had an open door policy and was interested in hearing about the new ideas people had. He was willing to try new ideas for a set period of time. It was a good learning experience for Mr. Rough, because he learned how to develop and implement new ideas. He also learned to be open to new initiatives and to take risks.

I believe that managers can help support their new (and seasoned) employees by being open to new ideas and taking time to listen to their colleagues. Ideas have to be discussed in order for them to fully develop. Open communication is key to having a harmonious and innovative work place. Discussing ideas amongst the staff may also allow seasoned employees to contribute some of their institutional knowledge on things that have or have not worked well in the past. Institutional knowledge is something new employees lack and can greatly benefit from.

Many new ideas come from attending conferences and other professional development activities. I know we are in tough financial times, so even if your organization cannot fund employees to attend events, allowing them the time off to go shows you support their development and encourage new ideas.

New employees often want to connect with other staffers who are new too. This is how I felt when I started my first professional job with the federal government and how the NewFeds committee came about. The NewFeds is a Federal Library Information Center Committee (FLICC) Working Group. We are building a community for those new to working for the federal government, specifically in libraries.

Aimee is a native of upstate NY living in the Washington DC metro area. She has a Bachelors of Arts in Communications from SUNY New Paltz and a Masters in Library Science from the University of Maryland at College Park. Aimee is a 2007 Spectrum Scholar and a 2010 Association of Research Libraries Career Enhancement Fellow.

Currently a librarian at a federal law enforcement agency, her work focuses on chemistry and pharmacology research, reorganizing the library’s intranet website, and creating a taxonomy of acronyms and abbreviations. Aimee is active in the DC Chapter of the Special Library Association, and co-author for the Chapter Notes bimonthly newsletter in the “Career Column”. In addition, she is involved with the Federal Armed Forces Librarians Roundtable, New Members Roundtable of the American Library Association (ALA), and the ALA Diversity Committee’s Research Grants Advisory Group. Read her full bio at http://about.me/aimeebe/bio

by Ned Potter, Europe Chapter, Leadership & Management Division
by Laura Woods, Europe Chapter, Leadership & Management and Legal Divisions

Libraries and information professionals are stuck in a bit of an echo chamber. We spend way too much time talking to one another, and not nearly enough time talking to the potential users. Potential users who have no idea really what a (future ready) library does, but who would probably come and visit if they did. Some people use an analogy of ‘floating voters’ to describe those currently indifferent to libraries, but I think our offer has changed so much and people’s perceptions of libraries are so far behind, these are people who don’t even realise there’s an election on…

Classic examples of our preaching to the converted often come when the profession or the industry is criticised from outside. When Seth Godin or someone from the national press puts us down, our first urge seems to be to find another librarian to commiserate with. This doesn’t do anything, not really – it’s great to engage the library community by blogging about it, but library blogs tend to be read by other librarians –  we also need to engage the people who heard all the bad stuff about libraries in the first place. We need to fight back in public. In short, we need to take greater control of the narrative arc concerning libraries, and stop letting other people write our story for us.

The presentation below is one used by myself and Laura Woods when we talk about the echo chamber – follow the Prezi through to find out more about the concept, about how it impacts negatively on libraries, and to see some ideas for marketing libraries outside of the echo chamber in future.

Ned Potter works in the field of digitisation at an academic library in the UK; he was named as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker for 2011, and is about to attend the SLA Annual Conference in Philly as a winner of the SLA-Europe Early Career Conference Award. His blog and other presentations can be found at www.thewikiman.org.
Laura Woods is the current Webmaster and Bulletin Editor for the Europe Chapter. Her blog, Organising Chaos can be read at http://woodsiegirl.wordpress.com/.

by Kendra Levine, San Francisco Bay Chapter

Librarians as a profession seem deeply worried about the future. That concern is comforting in that it’s clear we are forward thinking, but at times it also verges on the absurd. Some, in attempt to not appear complacent or unwilling to adapt, love wagging their fingers and constantly re-branding themselves (and the rest of the profession) to appear relevant. It’s a lot of posturing and I’m not convinced entirely productive, though it probably makes people feel like they’re doing something.

The meaning is lost in the message. What is at the heart of it is this: The world is changing. Change is inevitable. It didn’t start with computers and it won’t end with the semantic web. The key to being Future Ready is to be flexible and adaptable, keeping an eye on the horizon but also one on the direct road ahead. How can you set yourself to be better today and years from now? That’s what we need to focus on, as well as recognizing that there is no single solution.

One of the qualities I value in SLA is the diversity of its membership. We work for many different organizations, fulfilling several roles. Together we learn, evolve, and grow, while directly benefiting our organizations and ourselves. To keep this up, we need to limber up and have fun. Moving forward, the key to success will not lay staying on top of the lingo but re-evaluating our roles and communicating with our stakeholders to better serve them and ourselves. Nothing fancy about that.

Kendra Levine is a member of multiple divisions and caucuses within SLA. She was most recently Secretary of the Academic division. She is a Reference Librarian, at the Institute of Transportation Studies Library, part of the University of California at Berkeley.