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.

Downsizing. Budget cuts. Doing more with less. Libraries are fluent in the language of a sluggish economy. The role and function of libraries are constantly evolving due to limited resources, technology, the needs and expectations of the demographic it serves, not to mention (paraphrasing from my favorite movie, My Cousin Vinny) “the biological clock” of a diverse workforce.

As library leadership restructures place and space, there needs to be an assessment of the faces within libraries for future readiness. Libraries are openly accessible to all people and should reflect the American diaspora. There is no other institution in my opinion, other than a library, where different philosophy of thoughts, cultures, political views, religious beliefs, and Harry Potter converge without the threat of another world war. However, are the faces of the professional staff in alignment to the tenets in which libraries uphold? If there are only two members of color in your organization, one professional staff member and the head of facilities, this is not the making of a diverse staff and should be addressed with the same fervor and excitement in which we tackle the perils of technologies and services for our libraries.

A factor that hiring committees consider when selecting a potential candidate is the individuals’ ability to fit in the culture of the organization. Instead of making a determination on whether a candidate will fit in the culture of their organization, leadership needs to assess how the culture within the library embrace differences and are willing to challenge the status quo. Only then will libraries embody change and tolerance within the community it serves, as well as, amongst its staff. This is real diversity in action that can effectively help the future growth of intelligence in the library profession.

Charlene Johnson is graduate student at North Carolina Central University’s School of Library and Information Sciences in Durham, NC. She is a 2011 Association of Research Libraries Career Enhancement Program Fellow (completing an eight week summer internship at the University of Washington, Seattle) and currently serves as the NCCU Special Library Association student group president. Charlene earned a bachelor’s degree from Meredith College and will receive her master’s from North Carolina Central University in December 2011 with an emphasis in special and digital libraries. She can be reached at charlenejohnson@nc.rr.com.

Dear Members:

The rapid evolution of the information industry, along with input from SLA members, has spurred the SLA Board of Directors to develop an updated strategic vision for SLA. This vision will serve as a roadmap for our association between now and 2014 to provide the best career-enhancing benefits to our 9,000-plus members worldwide.

The strategic vision reflects the fact that SLA Board members listened to a lot of member input. Given the diversity of SLA’s membership (academic, corporate, self-employed, etc.), we expect every SLA member to find some aspects exciting…and other aspects less so.  The strategic vision is a high level summation of bold goals, and we know boldness carries risk.  But we want to be bold, and we want your participation to follow the input you provided.  The specifics of implementing the vision will depend entirely on member engagement, and details will vary among each chapters and division.

We invite you to read the strategic vision with care, and then consider where you wish to put your efforts.  Members are the drivers for success in reaching the vision’s elements; where do you fit so that your volunteer contribution will generate the greatest benefit for your SLA unit and for yourself?

Your avenues for responding include the Future Ready 365 blog (today and during the first week of December), your chapter, your division, any special interest group (example: First 5 Years), the Board, and your personal professional network within SLA.  To facilitate idea-sharing, members of the Board will be hosting a Future Ready blog post detailing each focus area, and will be responding to members’ comments and ideas beginning November 28^th through December 2^nd.

SLA leaders look forward to hearing from you. Send an email to your chapter president or division chair, comment on the 365 blog right now, or call a board member.  We are here for you!

We’re pleased to unveil this updated strategic vision—a plan that is at once ambitious and realistic:

Vision:

SLA is a vibrant, global association of professionals who are employed in every sector of the information and knowledge economy. Our members thrive where data, information, and knowledge intersect and our strategic partners support SLA because they believe in the association’s mission and the future of its members. The goal of SLA is to support information professionals as they contribute, in their varied and evolving roles, to the opportunities and achievements of organizations, communities, and society.

Key Areas of Focus:

To supplement the strategic vision, priorities have been identified to guide the association’s leaders, volunteers, and staff toward fulfillment.  Focus areas include:

Annual Conference: SLA’s chief member-benefit is its highest priority. We will increase collaboration across SLA’s divisions to provide more focused, refined content. This collaboration will leverage our professional experience and institutional knowledge to ensure increased relevance of programming for SLA’s conference attendees. While increasing specificity of topics is key, focus will also be placed on broadening opportunities for learning (November 28^th blog post by Mary Ellen Bates, Division Cabinet Chair).

Professional Development: SLA’s value to its membership will be enhanced not only through improved in-person development offerings, but in combination with a year-round, virtual education program. We will define a new approach to providing reliable and useful professional development programming, comprising virtual opportunities throughout the year, and partnerships with schools of library and information science to co-develop content, communications, and delivery of educational programs (November 29^th blog post by Sara Tompson, Director).

Creating Richer Volunteer Experiences to Develop In-Demand Skills: A fulfilled association-vision will depend heavily upon SLA’s volunteer-force—the network that gives the association its strength and relevance. What better incentive to become active in the association than the fact that it will benefit your career down the road? New skills picked up as volunteers in our chapters and divisions may just be the stepping stones to a promotion or achievement at work.  Added focus will be placed on creating richer volunteer experiences in the areas of web development (search engine optimization, plug-in development and research), marketing (developing a marketing plan for local events and programs), program management (overseeing budgets, fund raising with local vendor communities), and more. SLA’s volunteers will be powerfully well-rounded in the years to come (November 30^th blog post by Daniel Lee, Director).

Opening New Markets Through Collaboration: A bright future for SLA depends on collaboration with key partners within the information industry. We will strive toward an increase in opportunities available to SLA’s membership through affiliation with schools of library and information science and the vendors who provide products and services that empower SLA members (December 1^st blog post by Brent Mai, President-Elect).

Growth Through Diversification:  The information profession is evolving faster than ever, thanks to the rapid rate of technological change and innovation. In this evolution lies opportunity to grow SLA’s offerings to new and nontraditional sectors of the information profession, and to enhance SLA as a professional home for these groups—e.g. competitive intelligence specialists, IT development specialists, and software and standards trainers (December 2^nd blog post by Richard Huffine, Division Cabinet Chair-Elect).

Envisioning a Bright Future:

The focus areas described above are highlights of our plan to fulfill a prosperous vision for the future. It goes without saying that each area of focus is inter-woven—each one depends on the other. As always, the value here lies in the opportunity to network, to try on something new, to step out of our comfort zones, and to achieve more than ever before. The Board of Directors encourages members to discuss ways in which they may participate and contribute to making the vision a reality. I am confident that as I pass the torch to incoming President Brent Mai and President-Elect Deb Hunt that the strength of the association’s volunteer force and staff will put us in a position that is both stable and pioneering within the information industry.

Here’s to success in 2012 and beyond!
2011 SLA President,
Cindy Romaine

Cindy Romaine is the current SLA President and is focused on encouraging members to be Future Ready 24/7 in 2011.

By Stephen Abram, Toronto Chapter, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Leadership & Management Divisions

Part 1

And the future is still in front of me and always will be! Cindy Romaine asked me to write a guest post for this blog and I am honoured to do so. I believe that her future ready theme is right on. The only thing we need to prepare for is the future. The past is gone and the present disappears in the blink of an eye. By coincidence I’ve just passed my 30th anniversary of graduating from library school and it’s caused me to reflect. I tell myself that I probably have another 30 years left. So I’ve decided that I am still mid-career. What have I learned in the first half of my library life about preparing for the future that may be in any useful?
Listed below are some personal insights that I’ve learned and have found them personally meaningful over the years, so I pass them on to you here in the hope that it helps us all become more future ready. Honestly, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and it’s probably better to learn that way, but here goes:

1. Watch the Banana: When it comes to observing user behaviour and changing behaviours it is wise to remember the banana. I was once forced to watch primates for days as part of a bachelor level primatology course. We often watched them eat. Upon returning to class, the professor gave us all bananas and asked us to peel them like an ape. North Americans grab the banana by the stem and pull it open. This method crushes the top. The whole class proceeded to do it this way. He then showed a film of an ape peeling a banana. If we carefully observe chimpanzees and bananas we can see that they carefully pull the skin of a banana from the softer non-stem end and the white fruit is pristinely unwrapped as a thing of unbruised beauty. The lesson for us budding primatologists and ethnographers that I never forgot: Observe carefully. Don’t look for what you expect. When you’re looking for insights into human behaviour or the direction of the world, you’ll find it in what you don’t see at first.
2. Play with Vigor and Intent: Everyone who knows me knows that I am a huge proponent of play in the workplace. This isn’t just playing with all of the new technology toys and websites that are presenting us with opportunities on a daily basis. I love that as much as the next person. What I am also advocating is that we also include ensuring that fun and humour enter our work lives on a daily basis (or more) too. Secondly, focus is good but focusing too intently is not as great. You can see opportunity in new things when you play. When you research or investigate something for work alone with your workplace goggles on, sometimes you miss the biggest opportunities in the innovation. Occasional undirected play at work loosens the unconscious and frees the mind to explore new ideas. Successful people and work teams leave time for play – alone and together. Play is not frivolous but remains one of the most potent learning strategies there is. And, frankly, it makes it fun to go to work every day. Happy teams, having fun together, is, I believe, a predictor of workplace success, employee retention, and lifelong health. Do you make time to play? Relax. You will see more opportunities for a better future in a relaxed state than all of the moments of intense concentration combined. Are you laughing and giggling enough all day? Live intentionally.
3. Hang out with different people and people who are different than you: Lately, I’ve been thinking about the echo chamber that is librarianship. I worry that we are listening too much to each other and not enough to others. I am not advocating that we listen less to eachother but that we adjust the balance to include more voices. How do our real customers talk about their encounters with the new information technologies? If we talk about ‘e-books’ and they talk about ‘reading’ (see the difference?), are we framing the issues correctly? And, how diverse is the community of people you deal with? Are there enough non-librarians, non family members, in your circle? How about the wonderful demographic mosaic of gender, age, nationality, ethnicity, race, language and geography in your conversation zone? Is it diverse? Do you have personal experience with young librarians and young people or vice versa? Do you travel enough to challenging experiences and places? Don’t sit with friends all the time at events or conferences – you already know them! People from diverse backgrounds can approach issues, decisions and problems in different and still valid ways. If your peers are non-diverse, I believe that it affects the quality of your insights and decisions. Mix it up.
4. Avoid the Eeyores! Some people add no value to your life and you run the risk of damaging yourself by being around them too much. People who are negative or critical in the extreme, but devoid of critical thinking are negative influences in your life. I love being around people who bang away at ideas aggressively to make them better. They’re awesome. I am talking about avoiding people who are joyless. As the economy gets worse, there seem to be more of these negative folks. Critical thinking allows for seeing weaknesses in an idea or argument and working toward correcting or improving or disproving the thinking. People for whom criticism, devoid of a context to improve ideas, where snark and name calling rule the day, are best avoided when the time can be spent with others who focus on making the world of ideas a better place. If you’ve ever met a person who is a black hole and sucks all of the life and happiness out of the room and conversation, you know what I mean. Run towards the light! The future needs to be somewhere where you want to be, and some people just can’t make that voyage. They’re locked in the ambiguity of the present tense.
5. Fail and Fail Often, but Fail Safe: You’ll discover the future by trying to invent it yourself. There are two kinds of people – those who create the future and those who live in their own personal, endless Hell of the present. Make the choice to be an animator in life. The avoidance of risk is death to growth and adaptability. Take small and manageable risks in order to learn. You’re not learning to ski or skate unless you’re falling down. How many small risks of failure did you take today? It can be as simple as meeting someone you don’t know, trying a new website, changing your
   personal style of interaction or something even bigger like loading new software or temporarily changing a work process. Try to recall when you learned to ride a bicycle. Remember the failures and then the heart floating feeling of balance and movement? I remember when I first tried public speaking with some embarrassment but I got better over time with my supportive SLA network. The opportunities to try new things are endless and, yet, we seem to partake of them too rarely. Can you schedule a daily potential-risk-of-failure-event until it becomes a habit and part of your work life? Grow pearls when you discover an irritant. Start small, pilot and experiment. Nurture and incubate. You’ll be a better professional for it.
6. Listen to your Gut: Bio-feedback works. I have learned to listen to my gut and persevere when I don’t feel right about something. Not every technology is future ready. Many have severe shortcomings or run the risk of damaging the world of information, knowledge, learning and more. Some just aren’t ready for primetime or anyone other than the early adopters. My subconscious tells me things if only I’d listen to it. I am not saying that it is telling me in black and white to do or not do something. It is often telling me things that affect the direction and experience. My gut senses distrust faster than my mind. It tells me when something might be conflicting with my personal or professional values or morals. My gut tells me when I’m not quite ready. My gut tells me when I have lingered too long in a lovely past paradigm that is now failing me. Trust your gut.
7. Do and Try: It’s not enough to be just an observer. Participate in the world as it changes. Comment and learn. Share – write, blog, tweet, and have deep conversations. Experience comes from participation. The person watching the gold fish in the bowl does not understand the goldfish.
8. Encourage the Heart: One of the most delightful aspects of librarianship is our supportive networks. Also our workplaces tend to be clean and safe. We have a personal responsibility to take this gift and improve upon it. We have potentially thousands of interactions a month. With each interaction, with each moment of truth, we represent the best of what we have to offer to the world. We can make a huge difference in people’s lives. And, with our attitude we can encourage the heart. Wake up every day choosing to make a difference in your end users lives, and, for that matter, all of your co-workers, neighbours, and colleagues.

Watch for part two and 10 more!

Stephen Abram, MLS is a Past President of SLA and is Vice President, Strategic Partnerships and Markets, for Gale Cengage Learning. He is an SLA Fellow and the past president of the Ontario Library Association and the Canadian Library Association. In June 2003 he was awarded SLA’s John Cotton Dana Award and the AIIP Roger Summit Award in 2009. In 2011 he is Canada’s CLA Outstanding Librarian of the Year. He is the author of Out Front with Stephen Abram and Stephen’s Lighthouse blog. Stephen would love to hear from you at stephen.abram@gmail.com.

by John Creighton

Community engagement is a public sector buzzword. Engagement is hailed as a key strategy to help keep institutions such as public libraries relevant now and in the future. But was does community engagement mean? And, more important, what is the purpose of community engagement?

Community engagement often is translated as a set of activities and/or events. People attend book readings, film screenings, a community dialogue. Attendance at these events becomes the purpose of engagement as well as the measure of success.

These types of activities are often worthwhile. But, does hosting an event, even if well attended, really make a library more relevant in the community? Is a meeting room with ample seating capacity an irreplaceable community asset? Can no other organization besides a library host a book reading, film screening or discussion?

To discover the full potential of civic engagement we must look beyond activities and set aside attendance as the primary metric of success.

Richard Harwood, founder of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, offers a definition for the purpose of community engagement that elevates engagement’s potential to new heights. Harwood challenges organizations to pursue community engagement as a means to improve the civic health of the community.

Let me state that again. The purpose of community engagement is to improve the civic health of the community.

What are some of the elements of a civically healthy community? The Harwood Institute’s research identifies factors such as these:

• Diverse layers of leadership at all levels of the community.
• A strong set of links and connections between diverse groups of people.
• Boundary spanning organizations and leaders willing to hold up a mirror to the community.
• A culture of constructive dialogue.

Embracing the idea that the purpose of community engagement is to improve the community’s civic health challenges engagement organizers to consider a different set of questions. The same activities are viewed in a different light.

A library team, for instance, might think differently about film screenings. The relevant questions become:

• How can we use film screenings to cultivate more diverse leadership at more levels of the community?
• How will the film screenings help people of different backgrounds forge strong connections?
• In what ways will the film screenings challenge people to look in the mirror and engage in constructive dialogue?

The ability to achieve these goals becomes the priority. Attendance becomes a secondary goal. These types of questions might even lead a library team to look outside its own buildings as the best place to show films and host conversations.

The measures of success change, too. Gatherings of a small group of people who are from diverse parts of the community may be deemed more successful than a well-attended event of like-minded library patrons.

An institution that is able to contribute to the civic health of its community – rather than just host an entertaining event – over time is far more relevant.

To what extent is your organization improving the civic health of your community?

John Creighton, a Longmont, Colorado leadership consultant, writes on community life and public leadership at johncr8on.com. He can be found on Twitter @johncr8on and on Facebook. John also is a member of The Harwood Institute’s national faculty.

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.