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 Mary Talley, Washington, DC and Maryland Chapters, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Knowledge Management, Legal, and Leadership & Management Divisions

It was a wonderful life. When I started out, libraries and librarians were the only information game in town. Books held the answers and we held the books. There was no question that our work supported our organizations in crucial and irreplaceable (if not always measurable) ways. We were sure of our value: they (formerly known as “patrons”) needed us to identify, organize and maintain the sources and get at the data. These were powerful, valuable positions. It was a wonderful life.

Then… Well, you know the rest. The competition arrived and with it the temptation of the low-hanging fruit of good-enough information that forced us to rethink our place and value in this ever-evolving, 2.0 information world. To complicate life further, technological change and the competition it brings with it isn’t coming in fits and spurts – it’s rapid and continuous.

But wait a minute – was our old place in the information world really all that wonderful? Did we drive our organizations back then, tending the gates of knowledge; or, were we really in adjunct, transactional roles? If our positions did not allow us to be active participants in driving our organizations’ goals and objectives, we were – and are – adjuncts in our organizations. In a self-serve, peer-to-peer, 2.0 information world, as long as we hold adjunct roles, we will remain at the periphery of the organization and continually challenged to prove our value.

What can we do to be truly future ready? Move the conversation away from “proving value” to being valuable and trade in our transactional roles for those that are directly involved in the high-value work of our organizations. Moving information professionals out of libraries and embedding them in user communities provides a path to that direct involvement. Embedding trades in the service-provider role for one as a team member accountable for the outcomes.

The rise of a highly-interactive, information environment is opening the way for embedded information professionals, as much as it is making these new roles imperative. Collaboration, immediacy, accessibility, the disintegration of boundaries, and a new emphasis on relationships – this is the 2.0 information world our user communities inhabit. This is what they expect when they seek information from technology or us. Luckily, these are also qualities associated with the provision of embedded information services.

Mary Talley heads TalleyPartners, an information management consulting firm specializing in strategic planning, repositioning and embedded information structures for information centers.  She currently serves as President of DC/SLA.

by Sandra Crumlish, Southern California Chapter, Biomedical & Life Sciences and Leadership & Management Divisions

One thing I have learned in the corporate world is that space is a high commodity. For the past 21 years I have been able to keep the Library in the same place – a somewhat large room with one wall of windows. The ideal space to allow people to feel like they are away from the desk to read and acquire information in a different environment. As we concentrate on utilizing technologies of the future to ready ourselves, our libraries, and our organizations for what is to come, let’s not forget our physical presence – where that applies.

The Library tends to lead the organization in adopting new technologies and is the first to provide virtual resources for the global organization. As we transition to a more digital than a mainly print library I am eyeing my space as a vulnerable target, and the vultures are slowly starting to circle. Future Ready is not just about planning our futures in the profession and keeping up. For those of us who have physical libraries we have to be even more creative and innovative about how our space becomes Future Ready as our print collections diminish in the face of providing more electronic materials. We are planning now because looking into the future two or three years will show us with fewer shelves full of books and journals, although we will always retain a print collection, it will just be smaller.

Welcome to the future! While we do not plan to have space-age seating and workstations, we do plan to have a space that aesthetically encourages people to actually visit the Library. Some of our brainstorming ideas center around collaboration spaces that do not look anything like mini conference cubicles. We are talking about circular spaces that allow dynamic discussion with teamwork tools available, displays of devices, diagrams, anatomical representations of implanted devices (ours of course), programmers and remote care units, new technologies, etc. – past, present and future. By providing access to our past and present, with room to boost creativity, our researchers can plan and design for the future. This creative-enhancing space will provide unique resources for the future and they will not all be digital.

The future holds so many possibilities we should not limit ours. We have to think of interactive experiences – the younger generation is coming to work with those of us who may be a little long in the tooth, but there is room for both our worlds to meet, especially if we want to compete.

Sandra Crumlish, Manager St. Jude Medical CRMD Library & Resource Center, developed St. Jude Medical’s Library from a bare storeroom with a few journals to a multi-disciplined library and was the driving force to create a virtual library, providing enterprise-wide access to medical, technical, business, and industry electronic resources. Sandra’s current focus is in developing a knowledge management initiative for the company and is working with the IT Web Development Team to create more efficient and capable tools to achieve that end.