by Deb Hunt, 2012 SLA President-Elect

I often hear my colleagues discuss how SLA or other professional associations need to do more for members. What I don’t hear so much is how we can do more for ourselves. There are opportunities to learn and expand our skillset and value through SLA, but we need to expend the effort and funds to take advantage of them. As a candidate for SLA President-Elect, I talked to members all over the world. Many are rightly concerned that jobs are going away and that we often feel like we are on a downward path. But, what I also hear are excuses:

• I don’t attend the annual conference, CE courses, local meetings, etc. because my company no longer pays my way;
• I’m unemployed and cannot afford to attend events;
• I don’t have time to develop new skills;
• I cannot do professional development while at work due to firewall issues.

My response is that we cannot afford NOT to attend events and continue learning. If we don’t invest in ourselves, who will? This past year, I invested a substantial sum of money to attend a virtual online course to earn a certification in enterprise content management, an area of work that I’ve moved into over the past few years. Did a client or employer require me to earn this certificate? No, but I recognized that it gave me more credibility with potential clients and was well worth the time, effort and money.

Over my many years in the information profession, I’ve seen us move into areas of work that didn’t even appear on the radar back when I was in graduate school. If we continue to be future ready and agile, we can expand into other careers where there are jobs, money and opportunity. As I’ve added services to my own business, Information Edge, beyond more traditional areas of research and value-added analysis and library design and automation, I’ve leapt off the edge into expanding areas of opportunity. I’ve moved into document and enterprise content management, building on my info pro skillset, always learning, always on the lookout for new opportunities. There is a whole world out there that needs our skills and expertise, but we must be willing to take the leap, ever-learning, ever investing in ourselves and branding what we do as a valuable asset to any organization.

Deb Hunt is Principal of Information Edge which empowers clients to find the information they need to do their work. Information Edge specializes in enterprise content management, knowledge services, professional research, and library design and automation.
Deb has been a member of SLA since 1986 and SLA’s 2012 President-Elect. She served on the SLA Board as a Director from 2008-2010 and is the creator and team leader of SLA’s 23 Things, for which she received the SLA Presidential Award. She is a past President of the San Francisco Bay Region Chapter and a member of the Silicon Valley chapter and the Library Management, KM, and IT divisions. She is an active member in the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) and served on its Board of Directors from 2001-2003.

by Julie Bolding, Minnesota Chapter, Transportation Division

The South Dakota Department of Transportation first hired me as a temporary librarian to catalog its technical library collection. When that job was done, I moved on to a permanent management analyst position, where I wrote, edited and organized policy documents. I occasionally wrote and edited our newsletter and press releases as well. Learning how to use the industry standard program for desktop publishing, Adobe InDesign, was a great career help. I started by writing and designing an organizational “fact book” and moved on to create the agency’s first public annual report in decades.

Inexpensive continuing education in my rural location is difficult to obtain. A big help in learning new software programs has been online Ed 2 Go classes offered through my local university extension. I took the Adobe InDesign and Adobe Dreamweaver courses. Courses are part time, six weeks long and are non-college credit (groovy certificate suitable for framing). The instructors were experts in their fields and often published. Interaction with other students and the teacher was through an electronic bulletin board.

I can’t recommend these enough for librarians wishing to learn to program computers or learn a specific software program.  The courses are well organized, teaching quality is high, and the price is modest, just $84. If you’re looking to add skills to be future ready, this is one way to go. You can check out the Ed 2 Go course catalog at: www.ed2go.com.

Julie Bolding joined the Special Libraries Association News Division while at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1992-1994. She now is a member of the Transportation Division. In her off time in the spring and summer, she manages the Capital City Farmers Market in Pierre, South Dakota. In the winter, she drives through the barren expanses of South Dakota, North Dakota and southwestern Minnesota to her son’s high school hockey games.

This week’s posts come from truly gifted professionals of the SLA North Carolina chapter. While each representative has made an effort to keep their topics inline with the central theme of SLA Future Ready 365 blog, you will notice that each post provides a unique perspective and is intended to help a variety of readers that visit the blog. For more information about our members and the North Carolina chapter, be sure to visit ncarolina.sla.org.

The future ready librarian must possess soft skills of marketing and salesmanship as well as the technical knowledge to perform day-to-day duties. In the new normal economy, those who do not provide value that the employers understand will find their employment in peril. Become the best marketer of your skills and value you can be! Here are a few suggestions to survive and be future ready!

• Know your product–You! Know your skills and how an organization can benefit from having you as an asset. Know the size, type, organization, and culture in which you wish to work and market to those employers.
• Demonstrate value–In order to stay employed, you have to understand what the employer values and how to present that information in an understandable way. This is trickier than it sounds. I happen to know of one organization where the information professionals were not allowed to talk to management!
• Hone your skills–Continue your education and tailor the learning to your strengths and the needs of your present and future employers. Take advantage of any educational support because it is a benefit to you, but you must choose to take advantage of it. Just remember, your present and future competition may be improving their skills and acquiring new ones.
• In business, “Location, Location, Location” is a common saying. In the new normal economy, ”Network, Network, Network” should be your personal mantra. Go to conferences, have business cards ready, get involved in your local library groups. Most importantly, take the time to consider which of your contacts you should meet. Being helpful to other networkers pays dividends! Good luck!

Mason is a librarian/information professional from Raleigh, NC. He graduated from Florida State University’s online program with an M.S. in Library and Information Science in 2008. He worked at Strayer University and The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences. Currently he is the Career Chair for the North Carolina Chapter of the Special Libraries Association where he is part of the resume review service development team and acts as a mentor and resume reviewer for new information professionals.

by Sara Tompson

SLA needs to be growing and supporting continuously competent professionals. In a field that changes as rapidly as does ours – I know I am not the only one who originally learned to search online using BRS After Dark, a 300 baud acoustic coupler and thermal paper (!) – continuous learning is absolutely critical in order to survive and thrive and be of value to our organizations.

I have long seen competencies as a very useful framework for professional development, have written and spoken on this view, and have used SLA competencies in teaching LIS graduate students. Therefore I am pleased that SLA’s Professional Development Program is ranked fairly high in importance on the new Strategic Vision we all helped create. I would like to see competencies made even more explicit in the plan, though they are strongly implied therein.

The first order of business we’ve set for ourselves for 2012 includes defining and documenting a new strategic approach that integrates professional development opportunities throughout the year and in different modalities, not just annually face-to-face at Continuing Education conference workshops. Great! We are moving towards a continuous learning program.

This new approach to SLA professional development requires feedback from the Professional Development Advisory Council (PDAC). PDAC currently helps SLA staff review CE workshop proposals and has been charged with reviewing and proposing updates to the SLA Competencies document (which also should be a living, continuous document). Again, great! This should help integrate the competencies framework. In addition, SLA President Cindy Romaine has recently appointed a special task force to help fast track the competencies document review. I hope to see a re-energized PDAC partnering in that effort in 2012.

We also plan to reach out to iSchools to examine and propose opportunities for professional development programming. Once again, great! The iSchools (I would include LIS programs in a broad definition thereof) are training the next generation of librarians and information professionals, and it is exciting to have a hand in that effort (as those of us who teach know!). PDAC had a fruitful Skype discussion with some SLA leaders earlier this year about the importance of competencies for iSchools, including the need to promote relevant special libraries competencies into curricula where possible, noting that ALA competencies are more woven into these graduate schools than are SLA’s. I hope to see everyone who is or has taught information professionals contributing to professional development/graduate information school partnership ideas.

Moving forward, we want to pilot and evaluate some partnership and solo programs, and refine them as necessary. We also want to look at partnering with other professional schools, e.g. MBA programs in business schools, for further opportunities. I think we can do this right, so the sum of the whole of the partnerships is greater than our impact individually.

Hoping to chat with many of you in SLA about professional development, via phone, email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. (See, we’ve all come quite a ways from that 300 baud dial up!)

Sara Tompson is one of SLA’s Directors, 2011-2013.

by Mary Ellen Bates

One area of focus for the Board of Directors as we implement our strategic plan is in building and enhancing the Annual Conference. It’s one of our chief member benefits, as well as a significant source of association income. We also recognize that the conference needs some adjustments to reflect the current concerns and issues of our members, as well as the market in which we operate.

Since it’s one of my passions, I’d like to share the vision that the board has developed regarding the Annual Conference. As anyone who has ever been involved in conference planning knows, it involves a significant time commitment, often spanning several years, on the part of many volunteers. In order to continue offering high value to members, we see the need for a more strategic approach to planning the conference, in which our volunteers’ valuable professional time is used in the best way possible. We have selected several avenues to pursue for the next three years:

• Develop a more streamlined way to develop conference content
• Offer more value to more senior members
• Develop our virtual conference activities

What will this look like? In terms of the conference programming, division leaders will offer higher-level input and will be looking at ways to extend the programming virtually throughout the year. We also envision an executive track for experienced members that will have a high profile and will generate press coverage of the conference as well as publishable white papers. Our goal by 2014 is to have a full-time staff member involved in coordinating CE programs, conference programs and year-round education, in order to better support SLA’s strategic goal to support information professionals.

The number of sessions conducted during the Annual Conference will drop, as we combine similar topics and focus on providing fewer sessions of high quality. We also see the divisions offering more virtual programming throughout the year; this can be an opportunity to offer division-specific virtual programs that more division members could attend.

As a conference attendee of more years than I care to count (except that I’ll note that I have tote bags from two Annual Conferences in San Antonio), I know how valuable they are for my professional development. I am really passionate about finding ways for us to continue to add value to the conference, and to enable even more virtual learning for our members throughout the year.

I welcome your questions and comments. You can reach me at mbates@batesinfo.com or +1 303 772 7095. And I look forward to seeing many of you in Chicago in 2012!

Mary Ellen Bates is SLA’s Division Cabinet Chair.

by David Cappoli, Southern California Chapter

Reputation, content, and convenience – these are the core areas on which I am focused for the near future.  I oversee the Friday Forums for the UCLA Department of Information Studies. The forums are a series of continuing education workshops geared towards the needs of information professionals. With subjects ranging from an overview of competitive intelligence, to movements in youth literature, to understanding the needs of paper conservation, these workshops introduce professionals to emerging ideas and new ways of thinking about ongoing challenges. Nearly all of the workshops are hosted on campus, but my goal is to reach out beyond the confines of UCLA and find new audiences who can benefit from these workshops.

In moving forward to attain this goal, I will utilize the well-regarded reputations of the workshop instructors, and the forums themselves, which have been confirmed by surveys and evaluations. The instructors have been cultivated and identified because of their high levels of expertise; interest in helping people learn; and, preparedness. Their collective ability to engage participants confirms their value. I will also continue to examine the needs and trends in the information profession so as to work with instructors and develop content that is highly sought after, and easily employed in one’s career. And as content is created and developed, I will work on new methods of delivering it, whether it is done by offering virtual workshops or hosting off campus workshops. These options make continuing education more convenient for professionals enabling a higher rate of participation and a wider spread of the benefits gained from attending the workshops. An expectation of broader participation is that the reputations of the workshops will be further enhanced, thus feeding into the expansion of the Friday Forums.

The personal network that I have constructed with instructors as well as workshop participants will aid me in focusing on reputation, content, and convenience, as I seek a broader audience for the workshops. I am also aware a substantial amount of time and effort will need to be invested in order to succeed, but the benefits will be plentiful.

David Cappoli is the Digital Resources Librarian at UCLA. An active member of SLA locally and nationally, David has been president of the Southern California chapter, and a member of SLA’s Annual Conference and  Nominating committees.  He currently serves on SLA’s Public Relations Advisory Council.