Military Libraries come in all shapes and sizes. We’re academic libraries, supporting Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees. We’re public libraries, complete with children’s story hours and retiree’s financial resources. We’re also other types of special libraries: medical; history; science, technology & engineering; intelligence; and headquarters support. The Military Libraries Division brings together members from all U.S. military services, Canadian Combined Armed Forces, international military services, contractors, vendors, academic institutions and anyone with an interest in military librarianship. Check us out at http://military.sla.org/. – Gloria Miller is a Librarian at the Headquarters, U.S. Army Materiel Command, Redstone Arsenal (Huntsville), Alabama. She is currently the Chair-Elect of the Military Libraries Division.

 
Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, LiveJournal… Social Media is everywhere, and a lot of organizations are using it, with varying success to stay connected and interact directly with patrons. But in a world of reduced budgets, and more responsibilities being spread among fewer librarians, how can we make judicious choices regarding which services to participate in, and how to update them with the most efficiency and effectiveness?

For the Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) at Fort Leavenworth, and for many other institutions, both in the government and private sector, social media has filled that gap for us. During this last winter’s extreme weather, we were able to send messages to our subscribing patrons that we were closing earlier than scheduled, or that we would not be open the following day. We can remind patrons of library events, and pass on useful or interesting links. We’ve also developed a system to ensure that we spend the least amount of time updating, but achieve maximum impact across our social media outlets of Twitter, Facebook and Blogger.

I took over the library’s social media outreach in late 2009. An interest in the technology outside of the library made me a de facto “expert.” This is probably how many librarians become in charge of various services, and our social media campaign was no different. In coming on to the project, I first evaluated our current efforts. The blog and Facebook were updated sporadically, and often with verbatim repeats of press releases. There were multiple reasons for this; updating was cumbersome for staff members who did not use Facebook or Blogger every day, and there was little time or energy in the day for putting together interesting or original content.

This is where having an interested person, dedicated to the task helped us: assigning social media to a single individual and making it a moderately high priority makes sure that it does not become just another task that it would be nice to have done, if someone could spare the concentration or time for it. As busy as most of us are, we most often can’t spare the extra time or brainpower, unless we make it a priority, with scheduled days and times that social media can be updated. I consider the time spent replying to comments and generating new content as blocking out “meeting” time with our patrons.

I also looked at Army regulations and guidance regarding social media. In the last few years, the military has taken a great interest in the power of social media and have gone to great lengths to promote its responsible use. One of the many ideas behind this is that if we are not engaging in the conversation via social media, someone else is doing it for us.

Paying attention to the larger organization’s social media guidance is extremely important. We want to always be sure that we are representing and portraying our organization correctly, and are never releasing information that our organization does not want to have passed on.

With all of this knowledge in hand, I discussed with members of my organization what we hoped to accomplish with social media. At first, our overall goals were amorphous and vague other than a general desire to update social media regularly, do more to promote our social media presence, and to gather enough information through this to reevaluate and redirect our social media efforts periodically. Setting goals, milestones and evaluation checkpoints is just as important for social media as it is for any major project to be sure it is effective and on-task, and not wasting time or energy on something that, for whatever reason, just isn’t effective.

We also decided which social media was important to us. We cut Technorati and moved away from updating Flickr. Technorati had fallen out of use since the library had setup its account, and there were other, friendlier services. We let Flickr fall by the wayside because all of our efforts were going into uploading photos to our own digital library, and uploading them to another online service seemed like an additional time-consuming step with less return than the valuable investment of time warranted.

Our blog had already been set up on Blogger, and we saw this as important not only because of it had already been established, but because blogs afford the most flexibility with expression and the transmission of information. It can allow you to provide links, photos, videos, commentary, review, original articles and a variety of other formats with the least amount of effort. We wanted to keep our Facebook ―fan‖ page as well, in part due to being already established, but also because it took even less effort than Blogger to update. Facebook was also an outlet heavily favored by the Army.

The service we took the biggest gamble on was Twitter. While the service had been around for several years in 2009, it wasn‘t as ubiquitous as Facebook or as traditional (by New Media Standards) as a blog. Growing a Twitter following takes considerable time and effort, and can backfire, if you build it, but they do not come, to paraphrase Field of Dreams.

I started by searching for other Fort Leavenworth organizations that had Twitter accounts, such as the newspaper, the Command and General Staff College, and even Morale and Welfare. I also followed other Army Twitter accounts, including the @USArmy account, and other libraries and archives. By following them, I was able to keep up with things happening on the Fort, in the Army and in librarianship. I was also able to engage in conversations with these institutions, and forward, or  “retweet” their posts (called Tweets) to Fort Leavenworth‘s following.

Some of these institutions followed us back, or announced our existence to their followers, which helped get the word out about our presence. Whenever I posted to the blog, I also posted to Twitter and Facebook to tell followers that we had a new blog entry up, complete with a link directly to the article.

We promoted heavily inside the library with cards containing our Twitter, Facebook and Blog addresses. We also got the word out on our large information screen in the lobby, and by submitting to the post-wide announcements email. Slowly, as we continued to provide original content, announcements, reminders and links to articles or websites of interest, our following grew to a level on par with the number of social media followers of other Fort Leavenworth organizations. Several of our tweets and articles about librarianship and archives were forwarded or retweeted by our followers, which increased our exposure. One blog entry was retweeted by one of the Smithsonian Twitter accounts as well, a real treat and highlight for our library. Through consistent and quality updates, we had grown our following and made it worth our time to continue with.

I had planned to work on our social media at least two days a week, every Tuesday and Friday. However, if you post all of your links, articles and information on only two days, over the course of a few hours, and “flood” your followers with information, it can overwhelm them, or cause them to tune you out. Spreading out blog posts was easy; Blogger has a feature that allows you to change the post date and time. Changing the date to a future date meant that I did not need to actually generate a post on Wednesday for one to appear. If nothing else, it looked like we were being more attentive to our social media than we actually were. The problem, however, was Twitter and Facebook, and the amount of time it took to copy and paste a blog URL or other information into each system. Not to mention the continued issue of flooding.

After trying several “apps” both for Facebook and Twitter, which would allow you to automatically update one with a post to the other, I settled on Hootsuite to manage this. It had several advantages. The first was that it only required one central login to update both services, and I could send to both services at once. There were other advantages as well. We could allow multiple “team” members to log into the library‘s account with their own individual usernames and passwords. We could also post-date Tweets and Facebook posts. I could spend an hour or two one or two days a week generating several blog posts and a handful of posts and tweets, but they would be spread across multiple days, all without me having to log back in to continue generating the content.

This sort of streamlining saved a significant amount of time and concentration. I could dedicate myself fully to the task once or twice a week, and see the rewards every single day.

Another technique that helped to reduce the amount of time I was spending on social media updates was to engage my fellow librarians to submit interesting information or blog posts on topics in which they were relative experts directly to me to be posted, so they did not need to bother logging in to anything, or worrying about formatting and posting procedures. I, on the other hand, had one less post to write. They submitted summaries of professional conferences they went to, book reviews, even information on common reference requests or helpful research links.

This technique gave staff a tiny and concise way to help with social networking that was in no way overwhelming, and allowed them to talk about something that they found personally to be interesting or fun.

As a continued way to promote our social media presence, and to make social media easier to use, I also have taught social media classes both for librarians and for our patrons. As time passes, the statistics culled via Facebook and Blogger’s tracking systems have let us see that our following, and therefore our effectiveness had continued to grow, reinforcing for us the value of popularity in our continued outreach.

We may break out into new forms of social media over time, as services rise and fall in usage. If we find our patrons are moving away from a service like Twitter and Facebook, and are moving over to a community blogging system like LiveJournal, or Tumblr, we will find ourselves going to where the people are. NPR has found success on Tumblr, and the Library of Congress has a huge collection of images available via Flickr. For now, we will just keep trying to perfect our utilization of the services that we already have.

Tammy Garrison is a digitization librarian attached to the archives and special collections department at the Combined Arms Research Library at Fort Leavenworth, KS. She has a strong interest in using digital media to connect patrons to library services and materials and believes in the power of libraries to make a difference in the lives of patrons. Library peeves include: excessive signage, dour librarians, and filing the graphic novels in the 700s.

In her free time, she teaches freshman communications courses and writes, including a comic (with Katy Shuttleworth) in the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords anthology from Mad Norwegian Press. She lives with her husband, foster dog, and six cats in Leavenworth, Kansas.

By Ken Wheaton, Pacific Northwest Chapter, Knowledge Management Division

Successful teams in sports have been working together for years to achieve common goals by capitalizing on individual strengths. Team members are often given a role based on strengths and skills. Basketball for example maximizes physical strengths by putting taller players in the center and forward positions. The most skilled ball handlers are put in guard positions. Communications within sports teams are essential, usually direct, clear, factual, quick and without any personal hidden agendas. A team coach provides good leadership through teaching and mentoring thereby helping the team reach their goals and objectives. Team members learn together to develop good communication skills, confidence, acceptance, share goals and objectives, problem solve, make decisions and most importantly learn to trust one another. Trust encourages everyone’s contribution to the common purpose.

In government, education and the private sector, remains of the Industrial Age are still with us. Teams and communication were not important during that period and the assembly line created islands of isolated knowledge (silos). Everyone had very defined task doing the same thing over and over as a part of creating the product. Your strengths didn’t really matter as long as you did your job. In this paradigm you were very replaceable. 

In “future ready” organizations when strengths are maximized within functional teams, full potential can be reached just as in a sports team. Do you really want to spend a lot of effort repairing your weaknesses or being immediately more productive using your strengths?  Other team members with strengths in the areas of your weaknesses will also become immediately more productive. For example, it can be difficult to both lead and facilitate a team. That can be resolved by the team leader having another team member do the facilitation. Also, someone good at details can usually better manage meeting minutes and making meeting arrangements. All teams go through the stages of forming (being nice), storming (challenging ideas and authority), norming (healing) and performing (trust has been built).  Many teams fail at the storming phase because the remains of the Industrial Age have taught us to resist conflict.  

In today’s knowledge economy, teams, especially cross-functional, can help break down these barriers of communication. Location is playing less and less of a role with virtual teams becoming more common with collaborative technologies.

Teams of the future will be more like a “Knowledge Café” where everyone has an equal chance to be heard and no one can be wrong; where every idea is important in reaching a consensus. You have seen this for years in sports teams with their traditional circular huddle to problem solve. To be “future ready,” encourage and be part of cross-functional teams to open up communication, and know your team members’ strengths utilizing them fully to achieve your organization’s goals and objectives.

Ken Wheaton is the 2011 president-elect of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of SLA and the Web Services Librarian for the Alaska State Court System. Ken received his undergraduate degree in Biology/Chemistry from Western Michigan University and his MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Ken has 18 years of experience in special libraries in government, education and the private sector. His expertise is in change management where he has undertaken some major transformations in both his personal and professional life.

Info-entrepreneurs, represented by the Association of Independent Information Professionals, stand out as innovative, forward thinking, and client focused information professionals.  This series of posts delivers future ready solutions and strategies from current and past presidents of AIIP.  As industry thought leaders they have much to share about staying ahead of the curve and delivering cost effective solutions to clients worldwide.  In this insightful series of postings readers will learn how to create a job for life by listening for opportunity, watching for changes, stretching to acquire new skills, finding a balance, planning for the long term, and drawing on your strengths. — C.S.

by Marcy Phelps

At a recent meeting of the I-25ers, a group of independent information professionals located in and around Colorado, we had an interesting discussion about staying focused. We all agreed it’s really hard these days, with the many hats we wear and the ever-increasing rate of change in our lives and work, to make decisions about whether or not to take a new direction.

In my nearly 12 years of running a business, I’ve found that long-range planning is the key to developing a path and staying on track. And it’s not just for business owners. Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, planning and setting goals for the next 5 to 10 years provides focus in our lives and milestones for success. It will also keep you sane.

We’re constantly juggling our varied job functions. Business owners, in addition to being researchers, knowledge managers, or consultants, also take care of an assortment of administrative, financial, marketing and other tasks on a daily basis. With cutbacks in the workplace, we’ve taken on additional roles and responsibilities – while trying to make sure our careers and our jobs are future ready. Having a long-range plan keeps you on target for each of your many roles.

It’s also easy these days to get distracted by the latest new toy or way of thinking. Technology develops at an ever-increasing rate, and ideas spread in an instant. It’s difficult to know what you should or should not pursue. Your long-range plan becomes a measure for how it all fits in with your life and your goals.

Long-range planning requires some time to think about where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. Block out a morning or afternoon, shut off email and other distractions, and find a place to work where you’ll be most creative.

Here are some tips for getting started with developing your personal and professional long-range plan:

Think big – It’s OK if you don’t reach all your goals. Go ahead and dare to dream. Visualize what you want your life to look like in 5 to 10 years. What kind of work do you want to do? At what level do you see your business or career?

Think about how to get from here to there – Consider what skills, resources, etc. you need to accomplish your goals. Should you take a class, join an association, hire a coach, or sign up for mentoring? What will it cost to carry out your plan, and how will you pay for it? 

Put it in writing – Don’t ask me why, but there’s something about committing something to paper (yes, pen and paper!) that sets things in motion. Trust me on this. When confronted by something new, take out your plan and see if it aligns with where you want to be and what you want to become.

Stay flexible – While your goals keep you on track, be open to new opportunities. You can’t plan for those out-of-the-blue job offers or disruptive technologies (who knew five years ago that we’d be tweeting with clients?). Again, use your plan as a guide.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this Future Ready 365 blog, it’s that we are the ones who control our futures. It just takes a little planning to get on the right path and to stay focused. The investment you make now will pay off in the future.

Marcy Phelps is the owner of Phelps Research, a provider of research and analysis to support business planning. She served as the AIIP 2009-2010 President and is the current Chair of SLA’s Advertising and Marketing Division.

by Regina Mays and Gayle Baker

Today, many libraries find it necessary to demonstrate the impact of what they do and to illustrate how the products and services of the library contribute to the goals of the overarching institution. The future ready librarian must have an array of tools to accomplish this.

Return on Investment (ROI) is an approach that is commonly used in evaluating business investments. In the strictest sense, ROI is a quantitative measure expressed as a ratio of the value returned to the institution for each monetary unit invested in the library.  Since a library is not a business, however, and the value it provides is not always a direct monetary return, some researchers are broadening the conception of ROI to include returns that affect the bottom line downstream and measure inherent values.

Special libraries are no strangers to ROI. In fact, special libraries have been the frontrunners of this type of research. Griffiths and King performed numerous studies in both corporate and government agency libraries in the 80s and 90s using cost/benefit analysis and ROI. More recent ROI studies in special libraries have found returns of anywhere from 2:1 to 18.6:1 or even higher.

The first thing to ask when beginning to design an ROI study is: what constitutes value? A good place to start is by looking at the goals of your organization and identifying ways that the library might contribute to those goals. For example, two recent studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Tennessee on ROI of academic libraries to the grants process focused on the monetary return of grant funding secured partly through the help of library-provided citations. Another value in that equation is the support of faculty research and productivity in general, which may not have a direct immediate monetary return to the university, but contributes value nonetheless.  In the second study, 94.5% of submitted research proposals included citations obtained through the University of Tennessee Libraries.  Faculty members commented about how access to electronic journals helped them, not only with their research, but also with their teaching.

ROI is one of many approaches to assessment and is most effective as part of a suite of methods. Just as you wouldn’t use a screwdriver to hammer a nail, ROI won’t be the best tool to use in every area. ROI is especially useful when there is an immediate return, for example helping your institution secure grants or contracts. But for those areas in which it is appropriate, it can be a very effective way of measuring the return on invested resources and demonstrating the value of the library’s contribution to the goals of users and to the goals of the organization as a whole.

Finally, these results should be communicated in ways that are meaningful and relatable. Often, putting a human face on the numbers is an effective approach.  For example, adding interviews to accompany the numbers or developing personas of typical uses and users.

Some useful links:

• Cornell University Library: Library value calculations: http://research.library.cornell.edu/value
• Lib-Value Project (IMLS grant # LG-06-0909152-09): Much information, including a free searchable database of over 800 items on value and ROI literature on all types of libraries: http://libvalue.cci.utk.edu/
• NN/LM MidContinental Region: Online tools for evaluating programs and services: http://nnlm.gov/mcr/evaluation/tools.html
• ACRL Value of Academic Libraries Report: A good overview of value research in all types of libraries, including special libraries: http://www.acrl.ala.org/value/

Regina Mays is Program Manager for the IMLS funded study Value, Outcomes, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries (“Lib-Value”) based at the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN.

Gayle Baker is Professor and Electronic Resources Coordinator at The University of Tennessee Libraries in Knoxville, TN, and has worked there since 1990. She is one of the librarians who is participating in the Lib-Value project.