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.

Library and Information Science students understandably are concerned about future employment, especially in an unsettled economy. When speaking before LibSci student organizations I often encourage them to look beyond traditional campus library jobs and envision their future careers more broadly as information entrepreneurs.

Specifically, I suggest their library student association place an ad in their campus newspaper or tack notices on faculty doors, offering to help organize information within any department on campus.  Most departments have no idea there is a School of Library & Information Science on campus, much less what you have to offer. Target your campus as your first market! When calls begin to come in … “Yes, I’d like one of your library science students to revamp our website” or “Might a library science student organize our student internship files into a database?” … then head on over to begin a reference interview, determine the project’s scope, and offer to organize the information physically or virtually in exchange for a practical experience, a good reference, or even a fee.
There’s a future job lurking in most every department on campus just waiting for information entrepreneurs. In the process of getting your first customers conveniently on campus, you’ll be educating campus employees about the Library & Information Science department and profession.  How do I know? When I sought to locally expand my database development business, I approached several local University departments and quickly captured several hours work per week. If Library & Information Science graduate students had gotten there first, the jobs may have been theirs!

Ann Stringfield, M.S.L.S. worked up through all the available Information Specialist ranks for 17 years in a corporate library, then fancied a change and created an independent business reselling Inmagic database software, developing databases, training, and consulting. She has been helping organizations harvest their knowledge for over 12 years as Proprietor of InfoCrofters (www.infocrofters.com.)

by Deb Schwarz, Southern California Chapter, IT & Legal Divisions

As a working information professional, a consultant, and an entrepreneur in the library space, I come across a lot of my colleagues and peers in a wide variety of jobs and industries during the course of my regular work schedule. The strong level of commitment to the work usually exhibited by most everyone I meet is striking, even when I find out that in reality many aren’t really happy with their current job situation.  That commitment level to the “work” is laudable, and of course entirely appropriate, but perhaps in thinking about Future Ready scenarios on a personal-career level, info-pros ought to reserve some of their energy towards committing to leveraging and repositioning themselves within the organization they serve.

I think many of us believe that sooner or later the print-bound library in many organizations, especially corporations and even law firms, will see its demise. Of course this transition has not reached its conclusion everywhere, but it probably will, and by how much is just a matter of degree.  Is this bad?  Well bibliophiles will have to get their fix elsewhere, but for the working information professional it could be liberating by bringing (or forcing!) opportunities to go forward into the organization, bringing your skills right along with you. Call it embedded or assimilation, but getting out of the physical library and installed as, say, a researcher supporting a business unit, or a knowledge manager handling proprietary work product, or managing content on SharePoint, or developing and refining taxonomies—well, all that sounds pretty exciting and challenging to me!

So how to get there? One way is use your information and reference skills and apply due diligence efforts to position yourself.  That’s all well and good you might say, but how? Every situation is different, of course, but a basic tenet is to understand the organization’s business strategy and study it to determine where there is a fit. For example, most organizations (particularly in this still recovering economy) are spending time and money on finding new customers or clients and retaining existing ones in order to stay competitive and grow. From an  information professional’s vantage point that could mean supporting marketing, business development, and competitive intelligence or being part of an internal strategy group.  Since the value of information in an information-overloaded, social media-blitzed world is golden, then doesn’t it follow that an information professional should have a participatory, if not a key role? A lot of analysts can’t do their jobs without having comprehensive, up-to-date, accurate information to analyze.  Who better to partner with than a knowledgable information guru (er…professional!)?

With the billions of dollars being spent on content it also makes sense to work with an organization’s procurement or purchasing department to support them as they go about negotiating contracts with vendors for subscriptions, site licenses, and other content. It would do your organization and its users of this information a great disservice to have such deals negotiated strictly by the bottom line and outside of the context of information users’ needs. Who knows this better than an information professional?

Are these jobs well-defined and easily found? Not always and not necessarily – although we at LAC often see many of these qualifications and requirements in various job descriptions.  And we have created a lot of these jobs through our consulting efforts and recommendations. Future ready may mean trail blazing.   Maybe getting out of the library but pitching your value, expertise and skills to the COO or the head of marketing is the trail you need to blaze. You may have to take an opportunity and turn it around as well as inside out in order to strategize how to go for it, but do go for it if you want to be a Future Ready information professional in this rapidly-transforming, information-trading environment.

LAC Group is a professional services firm specializing in information management, virtual research, recruiting and outsourcing (www.lac-group.com).  Deborah Schwarz received her MLS from the University of Toronto, and is the owner/founder of LAC Group, serving as its CEO.

Karen Sawatzky, Librarian, Tapper Cuddy LLP, Winnipeg, MB

Reposted with permission from Slaw.

Everyone’s talking about the future. From LegalTech New York, where the closing keynote was the practice of law in 2020, to IT’s role in the library of the future, and SLA’s FutureReady365 blog. It’s interesting to be reading about predictions on where our profession may be going. One document I came across a while ago was the Association of Research Libraries’ 2030 Scenarios : A User Guide for Research Libraries. I started reading it (it’s 92 pages!) to see if it had any application for a law firm library.

Can you imagine the world in 2030? I can’t, but the ARL Scenarios do. It’s not quite the future that I would like to see, but then, is the present what anyone predicted 20 years ago? The scenarios envision a world where researchers are free agents, and universities scramble for funding. (Hmm…how is that different from today, at least the second part?) There are four scenarios presented: Research Entrepreneurs, Reuse and Recycle, Disciplines in Charge, and Global Followers. Each one outlines a particular day in the life of a star researcher, Hannah Chen. The world is described slightly differently in each scenario, but varies on the theme that government funding of universities will dry up, mainly due to declining tax revenues, universities will seek more partnerships with businesses, and both students and faculty will be competing for meaningful positions.

So what are the strategic implications of these scenarios? Scenario 1: Research Entrepreneurs, resonated the most with me. Note the following strategic question that arose:

How do we begin now to develop the library professional of the future – a highly capable and credible service provider who can work directly with researchers with data preparation and curation capabilities? What skills are we currently developing in our library professionals that may not be valued in the future? (p. 39)

Replace “researcher” with “lawyer”, and we’re already at this scenario, at least regarding data preparation and curation capabilities (think compiling case law on a point of law, and determining which resources have the authority to be used to develop an argument). As to the skills we’re currently developing that may not be valued in the future – how about some of the audiovisual equipment training! All kidding aside, most of the skills I have are transferable across many occupations, and even something as library-specific as cataloguing can be useful in cross-training to write computer languages.

So how does this relate to the law firm library of the future? I’ve been thinking a lot about the physical space necessary to define the library of the near future, say in the next five years or so. My current space is fairly traditional – lots of shelving for (mostly) reporting series that are no longer collected, and a small work area. I haven’t quite figured out what is the best use of the space if I had the opportunity to renovate. Should there be more social areas, equipped with comfortable chairs and tables, to encourage use of the library as a place to meet and discuss? Or should it be a quiet area, where lawyers can review the resources they need without being disturbed? My personal preference is to see the space become more conducive to conversation – kind of like the lawyers’ lounge without the bar.

There have been a number of discussions of law library space recently. I especially enjoyed Louis Mirando’s posts, Rebuilding a Law School Library. Any ideas on what the future holds for law libraries? Will private firms outsource part or all of them? Or will it be a competitive advantage to house your own knowledge management team? What skills will we need? What does 2030 look like to you?

Karen Sawatzky is a law librarian at a business law firm in Winnipeg, MB. She is passionate about marketing and personal brand building.