by Michael Enyart, Wisconsin Chapter, Business & Finance Division

After a number of years in the profession, I have become a believer in the concept that most information is delivered through your social contacts. In the era of print resources it was the library with the librarian as the social connection that distributed information from those print resources.

Now we are in the time of electronic information and much of it is available to everyone. It is my belief that the librarian is still the social connection to much of what is on the internet. One of the roles that I see for Special Librarians is to be the repository for corporate knowledge. There is an article in the most recent McKinsey Quarterly that talks about companies using the big data that they now have to make decisions. One of the big challenges is that much of this data exists in departments about which there is little awareness of the richness of the data outside of that department. Making sure that everyone has awareness and access to this type of information is in the core competencies of librarians.

What I would suggest is that with the social media and the internet there is still a great need for the librarian, but perhaps not as great a need for the library.

Michael Enyart has been the Director of the Business Library, University of Wisconsin – Madison since 1989.

by Tim Ferguson, Editor, Forbes Asia

Sue Radlauer, the new Director of Research Services at Forbes, and subject of this post, has been an Information Specialist at Forbes since 2006, the year she received her MLIS from Drexel University. Prior to starting at Forbes, Sue was an Information Specialist at People magazine. Sue is a member of the New York Chapter, and the Divisions Business & Finance, News, and Solo Librarians.

Read the post here: http://blogs.forbes.com/timferguson/2011/07/27/in-praise-of-the-news-librarian/

Tim Ferguson edits Forbes Asia magazine, which circulates from Pakistan to Japan to Australia. We draw on the work of correspondents from throughout the region. I’m also interested in business developments from the rest of the world.

by Jeanne Miller, Michigan Chapter, Leadership & Management, Solo Librarians Divisions

I love the concept of Future Ready and applaud Cindy for coming up with that theme for her presidential year. I’ve been a librarian for a long time: my library school education pre-dated desktop computers and all that has followed.

I have lived through many iterations of feeling the need to be “future ready.” Each version has been a journey into a new aspect of my career, a new way to leverage the skills I developed in library school, a breath of fresh air in my workaday world. SLA helped me along the way. I went to sessions at SLA conferences, listening to people talk about gopher sites, the internet, and the world wide web – wondering if I really understood what those were and what they would mean for the way I did my work. When I attended a web design class in which the instructor discussed usability issues, I thought “Now here’s a no-brainer. Librarians have always thought about how our users will look for the information they want. This is not a new skill for us!”

But at this point in my life, future-ready also means retirement-ready. As much as I have loved my years as a librarian, I am ready to step into something else…something in the future. What will it be? How will I keep up? Will I still be information-savvy if I’m not in the workplace? How am I going to handle this version of future-ready?

Jeanne Miller received her AMLS in 1975 and has been providing information ever since. Throughout her career she has worked in special libraries in academic settings. Currently she serves as Director of Information Services and Publications for the University of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women. Jeanne is a past chair of Solo Division of SLA, former caucus convenor of the Women’s Issues Caucus (now dissolved) and has been an SLA member for over 20 years.

by Cherine Whitney, Rhode Island Chapter, Food, Agriculture & Nutrition Division

Inspired by Cindy Romaine to share an idea on 6/12, I am sharing my story. In April 2007 Emily Wild, a geographical librarian at US Geoogical survey presented a Powerpoint on GIS (Geographical Information Systems). Little did I know then that this knowledge would come in handy about 4 years later in ways I could have never anticipated. I was readying myself for my future.

July 7, 2007, my father died in Hospice Care of RI after complications of surgery. This was a significant event. Just as important, is that I used Hospice’s bereavement services for processing my grief.

Two years after his death, I became a Hospice Volunteer. I returned that love that came my way over those years. November 2010 I took a patient to a doctor’s appointment, and also delivered a food basket to him and his fmily. On that delivery, they shared with me that he had just been given 6 months to live. I hugged the wife saying let you find hope and peace for even one hour. April 2011, delivering another food basket (of course in my various seasonal hats ):) I found they had no volunteer to help. In middle May, weeks later, after helping them little, I was asked to find a map of a hiking area the patient had loved. The Hospice social worker wanted him to have meaning and a purpose in his life to help him not think of his impending death. She was planning to use this map for her own hike at a later date. So, using their tip to call the Town Hall, I asked for maps, picked them up May 20. I delivered them to the patient. Talking to him face to face, I found he loved these regular maps. But he needed something else. Using my information interview skills gently, I found out he needed a topographical and/or aerial view map.

After I left to prepare for Penelope Campbells’ talk/stay at my house, I called Town Hall from my car while still on their property. I asked the town clerks if they had this type of map. They said no, but GIS staff might. I called him. He was in. Explaining the urgent need for a Hospice patient, he asked me questions about the map requested. I said I did not know. Then I thought: have him talk to the patient. So, going back into the house, I told them I found someone to help the patient. They spoke. What an excellent, animated interaction!!! We all smiled and laughed! May 23, I picked up the map, a huge 36” by 36” topographical AND aerial. Delivering the information that day, the patient and family were overjoyed. I called the GIS staff person days later to thank him. He was away May 26-June 3! That was meant to be for me to be at that place at that time!

Wait, there is more! Best of all, the GIS guy waived the fee, and said he wanted to help make detailed maps of trails that existed and for non existing maps of trails. This patient’s knowledge, love of life, and nature would be his legacy for the future. He was doing it NOW! He had his purpose. He was making future ready trails! How awesome! I had helped him do this. What a connection!

Many thank yous came from the family, the social worker (who had sought the map for months from another volunteer), and the Volunteer Coordinator. I am honored to have given my skills, knowledge, love, for something that truly is important. The immediate need was met expeditiously. I used all of my skills. I did that EXTRA big time. Thank you SLA, Emily, and Chapter, filling Tony Stankus’, now a Fellow, shoes.

Cherine Whitney received her MLIS from the University of Rhode Island in 1998.  She has had a myriad of library experiences from children’s specialist at Providence Public Library, to special collections cataloger at Boston College, to her current position in Research Services at Providence College.  For more than five years Cherine has volunteered at Hasbro Children’s Hospital as a Childcare coordinator, reading and playing with patients in the Dental Clinic’s waiting area. With Home and Hospice Care of RI, she does vigils and visits with patients, and has worked with Camp Braveheart, for grieving children ages 4-17 (dressed in her marvelous hats, of course!) Cherine is President of the Rhode Island Chapter of SLA and has been so since 2009.

Introduction (Toni Wilson)

We started CI Week on the FR365 blog with a description of what competitive intelligence is and what it is not, and we are closing the week with the same focus – understanding what CI is and the value it delivers for information professionals and organizations with goals to be future-ready.  This blog post offers a graphic and practical description of how CI can be applied in real-world situations.

Picture this:  You are stuck in a horror film – a typical B-movie situation that already has multiple people dead or missing.  Do you want to go into the woods alone searching for a friend who has run off after a half-werewolf, half-robot-alien creature from the future has killed two of your other friends already?  If only you knew something about the Were-Bot.  Does it get full on two people or does it want to eat more?  Does it sleep after eating?  Perhaps it doesn’t like the taste of librarians.  All of this information could help you choose a future path, action, or next step.  It would be useful in this situation to have a Competitive Intelligence report on Were-Bots, and a librarian would be just the person to put it together.  Whether your business is ladders or law, school or screwdrivers, knowing what your competitors are doing, the composition of your clients, or, like our B-movie situation, the eating habits of your enemies, is invaluable.  The addition of this in-depth information can allow you to analyze yourself in relation to your partners within the company, and how, as a whole, you can relate to those outside.  Competitive intelligence makes an organization future ready by researching, compiling, and analyzing information on THEM, and it is this information that allows the right choices to be made moving forward.

Charles H. Frey has been the Manager of Reference Services at Neal Gerber & Eisenberg LLP in Chicago for four years.  He has been working in law firm libraries for 13 years and got his Library Science degree from the University of Kentucky.

by Connie Crosby, Toronto Chapter, KM, Legal, Taxonomy and Leadership & Management Divisions

We have a big opportunity to use our skills in initiatives beyond the library, to contribute to teams that bring together a range of skills. In the book The New Polymath (http://www.thenewpolymath.com/), Vinnie Mirchandani describes teams made up of experts with a range of backgrounds coming together to innovate in ways not previously seen.

Becoming an independent consultant has been an eye-opening experience for me. I work with teams of extremely smart, insightful people working with information who come from a range of backgrounds, not just library. By contrast, I find so often librarians want to hold ourselves apart as “us” versus “them” (librarians versus non-librarians) but really, it should just be “us”.  We are all on the same side, working toward the same goals.

And I am starting to take exception to those who try to hold librarians as somehow special. Distinct perhaps, yes, but not somehow better than others. In the process of justifying our place in the universe, I fear that librarians—primarily in the United States and Canada where we do not have licensing in our profession—have inadvertently excluded others in our workplaces and industries who we really should be respecting, working with, and learning from.

Many Library Technicians have horror stories about the difficulties they have faced in working with “MLS’s”, often times being passed over for jobs or promotions, or doing the same work as an MLS but with lower pay. So much of what we know in the library industry is learned on the job, that I often wonder how this can be. I think back to my own library school education a number of years ago: while I learned a lot at the time, very little of it today resembles my working reality, and very little of the program resembles today’s program. I can’t help but think that, once we have been in the working environment for a number of years, the experience counts for so much more.

We also often forget there are others in the information world, many of whom are also without the MLS degree: researchers, information consultants, information architects, knowledge managers, records managers, user experience specialists, indexers and taxonomists among others. While those with library degrees often excel in these areas, they are not prerequisites for success in the job. Since leaving the library workplace for consulting, I have come across and worked with so many different types of people, many who (much to my surprise) know an awful lot about information.

We do not own this, folks.

I therefore have a difficult time understanding the elitist mindset of some librarians. I do realize that in an economic downturn when we are all struggling to keep a roof over our heads, the effort to survive forces us to find ways to distinguish ourselves, and promoting our degrees over others’ is one way we often do this.

However, we need to keep in mind that different skill sets and personalities on our teams contribute to successful projects. I believe we can also learn a lot from one another, and have always benefited from working with others of backgrounds different from our own. If we are all going to work together, we need to be mindful and respectful of one another.

I know we fear losing our identities as librarians. But I am here to tell you: fear not!  Your paranoia is not justified! There is such a great opportunity here for learning from others. For while we learn from others, and treat them with respect, they learn from us and hopefully show us increased respect as well.

I know that when I tell people I am an information management consultant, their eyes glaze over. When I tell them I am a consultant with law librarian training, it suddenly captures their imagination and they have an instant vision of how I might help them. And when I work on projects with other consultants, they have an appreciation for my background and what I can bring to the project.

I am proud of my library degree, and continue to identify myself as a librarian. But, having worked as a technician in the past and working as an information consultant now, I can see that putting ourselves into an ivory tower is such a mistake. Exclusivity does not help us become stronger.

I would love for us to embrace the other information professionals out there, and have us welcome them into SLA more than we are doing now. It would enrich our own experience so much, bringing fresh viewpoints and ideas into our divisions and chapters. And it would give them a way to learn from us (i.e. librarians) as well.

And in your own working life, I encourage you to look beyond the physical limits of the library, and put yourself forward to participate on teams that might normally be outside your realm. They need you. And, you need them.

Photo credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Rich Vintage Photography

Connie Crosby is a consultant specializing in library management, information management, knowledge management, and social media inside the enterprise. Before consulting, she was a law library manager for 10 years in a Toronto law firm. Connie is a founding director and contributor for the co-operative law blog Slaw.ca and also writes for her own blog at http://conniecrosby.blogspot.com. She is an instructor with the iSchool Institute at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, teaching continuing education courses on social media and an  organizer of PodCamp Toronto, a gathering of social media professionals and enthusiasts in Canada, co-organizer of Knowledge Workers Toronto, a monthly meetup group. Her 2010 book Effective Blogging for Libraries is part of the Tech Set series from Neal-Schuman Publishers.

Juliane Schneider, Academic & IT Divisions

I’ve been a cataloger/data wrangler for much of my admittedly weird career.  I’ve never worked in a basement (always ground floor), but I speak MARC.  I can tell you that, after hearing the despairing pleas of thousands of dietary voices, MeSH has recently changed the heading “Cookery” to “Cooking.”  “Fleas” are now “Siphonaptera” which is quite the evocative term.

After 15 years of being all tech-servicey in a web startup, insurance library, medical center, religious headquarters, and publisher, cataloging is still about to be dead, our jobs are about to go away any second, and we remain undervalued, even by our fellow librarians.

Ah, Tech Services.  We are the emo band of librarians.

We make resources easily discoverable, available, downloadable and deliverable, and when we do our jobs well, we become invisible.  But–BUT–the LMS-es we deal with are becoming obsolete for our users.  No longer must they wade into separate libraries to use disparate databases; here at Harvard, 70+ libraries are in one catalog. Our fancy new Aquabrowser delivers Googlized results, but I can’t find what I want in there, and I’m the one who cataloged the stuff!

Here is our Opportunity!  We could work with the reference staff to create smaller, savvier, discoverable bits of resources tailored to local users. To do this, good cataloging is crucial to create the crosswalks for the records to go wherever the information needs to be presented, in a way that makes sense to individual users.

As Metadata Librarian what I really do is run around and find interesting things to do/cause trouble. My goal: projects that could involve Tech Services in an ‘embedded’ fashion.  Countway Library is sandwiched between  the Center for the History of Medicine, one of the premier historical medical collections in the world, in the basement and the Center for Biomedical Informatics, on the top floor.  The one thing I desperately want to do is to take the resources from these three places – past, present, and future – and make connections.

Another project, Tech Services as content producers.  This is probably my favorite paper ever:  http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361.  They took an article on tropical disease, added semantic links to the uBioPortal, and used the raw data from the authors to create geospatial and serological mashups (they call it ‘Data Fusion’ – sexxxay!). This is the kind of thing that Tech Services needs to add to their repertoire. It will make the faculty happy (up that ‘cited’ number with more dynamic publications!), it will make administration happy (our repository is better than their repository) and it will make us happy, because it is visible and makes a connection with people outside Tech Services!

A last project I’m working on is to place QR codes on the ends of stacks that, when scanned, will list the books shelved there.  For once, the user can access a true shelflist of our resources, and instantly know what is on the shelf, and what is remote.  I call that sexxxay, but maybe it is really just geek cataloging.

Juliane Schneider is the Metadata Librarian for Countway Library, Harvard Medical School.  In addition she works with the Center for Biomedical Informatics, the Center for the History of Medicine and Administration on projects from creating a Curriculum Management System to creating an autism ontology.  Currently, she is Chair-Elect of the Academic Division and Secretary of the IT Division.  In the past couple of years, she has a program planner, so she’s looking forward to SLA 2011, where she won’t have to worry about A/V and room setups!  You can connect with her via juliane_schneider@hms.harvard.edu, or on Twitter @JulianeS.

by Aileen Marshall, Virginia Chapter, Business & Finance, Competitive Intelligence Divisions

Here we are, March 2011…am I ready…are you? The job landscape for librarians and information professionals is more than tough, as we all know. Long-employed librarians face lay-offs, and students who are graduating soon are worried about finding work in the first place. Those who are fortunate to be employed face budget cuts and worry how they can keep up their level of service. In addition to all of this we have to fight a constant battle to demonstrate that librarians are needed! Add personal issues we all face to this mix, and I’d say this could be a very stressful year.

But fear not! Don’t think the glass is half-empty when, with a little bit of creativity and boldness, we can make it half-full again. Complaining about everything that is going wrong is tiring and does not lead to anything, really. Instead focus on how you can improve existing services with non-traditional resources and your passion for our profession.

About two weeks ago I attended a webinar facilitated by Scott Brown, a competitive intelligence professional, who spoke about using social media for business research. He showed us how to extract information from sources that are absolutely free! Using non-traditional sources for our work can be a huge deal, not only to gather valuable insight but also to stretch the budget. Just looking at his resources and how he utilizes something that most people see as completely unrelated to work inspired me to look for these kinds of information sources.

But social media is not only a great tool to obtain information. Working as law librarian in a public library, I use Facebook and Twitter to promote what the Central Rappahannock Regional Library has to offer. I have managed to increase patron awareness in our services by making use of social media and our blog. Many of my patrons are even willing to speak up for the library at the next budget meeting. Statistics and personal testimonies can go a long way when fighting for more money. I also advocate for my library and our profession in general as much as I can. So many people are not aware of the vast amount of materials that the library offers, and they are amazed when I tell them. And usually they come back with friends and family. So advocate, advocate, advocate. Involve your patrons and clients in your problems in a reasonable manner. You will see results in time.

Librarians are all about collaboration. So if you find a great new resource, let others know about it. Make use of our collective knowledge and wisdom to discover new ways of doing your job and getting results. Try to get out of your comfort zone, at least a little bit, and let people know how important libraries and information professionals are. Our future will be brighter than the present if every one of us contributes just a little bit.

Aileen Marshall is the law librarian at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Fredericksburg, VA.
She posses a MA from the Westfaelische Wilhelms-University in Muenster, Germany, and will graduate
from the University of South Carolina with her MLIS in May 2011. She can be contacted at www.cyndera.com

by Valrie Davis, Florida & Caribbean Chapter, Food, Agriculture & Nutrition Division

Many of us understand that we have moved beyond Web 2.0 and into Web 3.0 – sometimes called the Semantic Web.  But what does it all mean, how can librarians become a part of the effort, and can we take it a step further and, ourselves, become Librarian 3.0?  The World Wide Web, as we know it, is adding a new underlying semantic layer that allows machines to find, share and communicate meaning. Librarians are long familiar with the connections between data – but not how these types of connections might change or become enhanced with machine readability. Librarians have no reason to fear for our jobs (or rather, there is no reason to fear for our jobs as we know it) as there is a role for us in the new world of semantically driven information. We too can shape development and assist in the building of common links between data, resources, and services.  Towards that end, here are 8 easy steps to becoming Semantic Web savvy:

1. Get portable: make yourself and your services mobile.
2. Get social: understand what social networking tools exist for managing and sharing information.  We are becoming increasingly familiar with tools such as Twitter and the Google Suite.  The list grows by the day! (FriendFeed, Collexis, VIVO, Mendeley, BibApp, Scientopia, etc.)
3. Focus on the individual: semantics help build and serve communities, while simultaneously better serving the individual. People join community networks when their individual needs are met.  Web 3.0 is about personalizing the information experience.
4. Provide dynamic content: understand how machines can help deliver content to you. Find the tools that assist you in locating the information your user requires.
5. Widgets and mash-ups:  Identify which widget tools would be the best to showcase on your website. Be your own widget by combining or showcasing your services in unlikely places.
6. Organization: get involved in the underlying organization of information through the development of ontologies and other Semantic Web standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, SKOS, etc.).  It’s no longer just for catalogers and programmers!
7. Contextualize your support:  How is location important? Are your users device driven? Subject driven?
8. Filtering: Web 3.0 filters out the stuff that doesn’t pertain to your context – a time honored role of librarians.  Not only are we utilizing the Semantic Web to categorize resources (journal article, book, person, datasets, etc.) but also relationships (author of, employed by, head of) between resources.  These semantic relationships help us filter through the information to identify what we need (i.e., all journal articles written by people employed by University of X).

Becoming Semantic Web savvy isn’t as difficult as you think, and it’s the beginnings of a new and interesting approach to structuring and discussing data.  There are lots of great conferences having these conversations – get involved in the discussion and bring that discussion to SLA!  Additionally, look around and see how much you and your colleagues are already involved in some aspect of Web 3.0. You will be surprised.

Valrie Davis is an Agricultural Sciences Librarian at the University of Florida and the UF Implementation Lead for VIVO, a semantic web application used as the foundation for a national network of researchers (http://vivoweb.org). She has been a member of SLA since 2005 and is the current Chair of the Food, Agriculture, Nutrition Division.

By Gloria Miller, Military Libraries Division

I work in a cubicle. However, most of the people around me are not Librarians. This gives me opportunities to overhear conversations, ask questions, and join in whenever I think I can help. At first, the quizzical looks seem to say, “How can a Librarian help with this?” It doesn’t take long for them to realize the value of an Information Professional.

For me as well as my boss (also a cubicle Librarian), it has meant learning more than we ever expected to learn about Business Case Analysis, Excel, government contracting, SharePoint, and more. Each conversation becomes an opportunity to learn something else, and put it to use for the good of the organization as a whole. And every successful project becomes an advertisement for other teams to seek out the Library staff for input.

So, get out of your chair, leave your comfort zone, and stick your nose into hallway conversations. You’ll be surprised at where you may end up.

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.