How we tried out new tools, worked with lots of people and what we expectedly (and unexpectedly) learned along the way

by Katie Daugert and Lauren Sin, Washington DC Chapter, News Division

NPR’s Digital Media division recently implemented quarterly “Serendipity Days” in order to innovate in likely and unlikely ways. On Serendipity Days, staff is given the opportunity to take an entire day and a half away from their regular duties and develop a project or an idea of their own choosing. There are two simple rules to follow: the project must benefit NPR in some way and participants have to present their findings to each other.

For our Serendipity Days experience, we decided to create a training video to teach our colleagues both near and far how to run a basic search in NPR’s new internal archives and transcripts database. Artemis, named for the goddess of the hunt, contains all 40+ years of NPR’s programming metadata. The metadata has been created by NPR librarians over the years; Artemis, also developed by librarians, just launched in November.

We participated in Serendipity Days partly out of necessity (the video was one small part of our training/marketing strategy for Artemis), and partly out of curiosity. The luxury of having time to play around with a new idea has standout appeal!

A colleague recommended TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio, a screen capture software that allows you to record and edit screencasts and share produced videos. We collaborated to master the use of the software, wrote and edited a script, voiced and recorded the audio, and selected and added music, all within our allotted time.

The result? We now have a two-minute introductory video that allows our users to learn at their own pace, whenever they have time, wherever they work. Based on the overwhelming positive feedback we received from our video, we went on to create five more videos as part of our Artemis launch campaign. Check out our videos posted on Vimeo!

Our first Serendipity Days experience encouraged us to play with ideas and gave us the time and space we needed for creative thinking. The concentrated planning time and quick turnaround paid off – our project evolved into a major stepping stone in our outreach efforts. We collaborated with our clients, librarians and our Digital Media colleagues. We created new roles for ourselves, shifting from information curators to dynamic instructors and video producers. We are taking technology-smart approaches on how to engage our users and explore future methods of content delivery. Perhaps most importantly of all, we were delighted to find out that we can get a lot accomplished in a concentrated and intensive amount of time.

Katie Daugert is a Reference Librarian at NPR and co-leads the library’s training and outreach efforts. She partners with journalists and staff to research story ideas, track down and evaluate facts, audio resources, and public records. Her MSIS is from UT Austin.

Lauren Sin is a Broadcast Librarian at NPR, combing NPR’s vast media archive to help journalists create sound-rich content. She also manages the Library’s spoken word resources, a collection consisting of over 60,000 culturally and historically significant recordings. Her MLIS is from UCLA.

by Nicola Franklin, Europe Chapter, Business & Finance Division

When I was asked to contribute to this series of posts on how the library & information employment scene is changing, which positions or skills are disappearing and which new ones we need to prepare for, I asked on Twitter for any input and ideas people had.  There were surprisingly few skills or roles people thought were becoming obsolete – it was much more about new skills being added onto already existing ones!

Even skills which might be thought of as ‘old fashioned’ or no longer needed were defended.  One tweet in reply said “I think cataloguing – data librarianship and records cataloguing – is making a big comeback”.

Another good point that was made was ‘library/info skills are about people, not tech, why should they become obsolete?’.  This highlights the fact that, while the media might be books, journals, databases or online, the key goal of information people is how to ensure the content of that media is available to people when they need it.  Hence the need for such a wide spectrum of skills from cataloguing (taxonomy, metadata… insert other acronym of choice!) to influencing and advocating.

If the spectrum of media in which information is available ever swings 100% away from hard-copy books or journals, then maybe some skills will disappear (shelving, for example), but other skills will morph and change to suit changing technologies – so collection management will switch from a physical collection to a digital one.  The skills of liaising with users, analysing needs and selecting expensive materials to fit a particular budget will remain, however.  Instead of a physical display, there may be promotion of resources on an intranet or other communication system not yet envisaged.

With such a varied skill set being called for, I think it is always going to be the case that information teams will be needed, with some members who are meticulous, organised and methodical while others are more outgoing, persuasive and articulate, or more adept at developing or customising technology.  The true skill will lie in co-ordinating all these varied roles within one cohesive profession.

Nicola has worked with the information profession as a recruitment consultant for just over thirteen years, working at Information Business Services, PFJ and Sue Hill Recruitment in London, UK. At Fabric Recruitment Nicola leads the Information division, helping librarians, knowledge managers and records managers find that next best step in their career, and promotes all things social media to the team.

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 Camille Ann Brewer, New York Chapter, Museums, Arts & Humanities Division

I have been working as curator of contemporary art for the last 12 years.  Three years ago, I decided to return to school to earn a MLIS degree.  My thought was to have a “back-up” plan of working as a librarian as I watched employment opportunities dry up in the museum and gallery world.  Far more than a back up, the training has greatly augmented and enhanced my work as an art advisor and curator.  The entire program was conducted on-line; therefore I learned the course material in tandem with technological tools used by the university.  This exposure to new technologies has provided me with options that I had never considered before entering the degree program.  I am now creating blogs to support special exhibitions and their ancillary educational programs, building databases for private collectors that are designed in accordance with Getty Research Institute metadata standards for art objects, and exploring the possibilities of designing mobile device applications that make cataloging objects easier for small institution and private art collectors.

I currently spend a great deal of time traveling to clients to manage and appraise their collections.  After a series of bad airline flights and endless airport security “theater,” my hope over the next year is to minimize my travel by developing new and improved methods of collection management using the new tools being developed now in today’s market place.  One of my goals is to bring newly developed museum metadata standards to private collectors.  As art objects move from private hands to major cultural institutions, the respective metadata will migrate seamlessly into the larger database systems.

In my mind, being Future Ready means keeping abreast of the latest developments in technology while engaging creative thinking as to how these new tools and systems can augment what I do as an arts professional.   I am more excited now than I was five years ago about the opportunities that are presenting themselves as I approach my career from an interdisciplinary perspective.  It is in the intersection of these disparate disciplines where the excitement and hope for the future begins.

Based in New York City, Camille Ann Brewer is a fine art advisor and appraiser of contemporary American art and traditional African art. She is a member of the New York Chapter of SLA.  More information about Ms. Brewer can be located at www.cabfineart.com

By Gayle Pellizzer, LAC Group

Are you a tech-savvy problem solver?  Do you enjoy organizing content in multiple forms in order to improve access across different business lines and units?  Perhaps a career in digital asset management, or DAM, is in your future.  Digital asset management is an exciting, rapidly growing field that is eager to hire the best and brightest information pros who are not afraid of change and willing to think “big picture” in order organize, manage, and deploy digital assets throughout a company or organization.  Take a quick look at the speakers featured at the 2010 Henry Stewart DAM Conferences that took place in New York, London, Chicago, and Los Angeles.   These leaders in digital asset management have diverse backgrounds and multifaceted skills-sets.  Not simply metadata experts or archivists, these individuals are skilled professionals who understand that managing digital assets requires both business and technological acumen, as well as a firm understanding of how information, particularly different forms of digital content, are effectively organized, classified, and accessed by the user.

Although DAM may not be in your current job description, it is an area worth exploring.  As new opportunities for information professionals continue to move away from the traditional research and reference role, it is imperative to understand what skills, both soft and hard, are required of those who handle “everything digital” or “everything media related.”  Companies and organizations from all sectors, including web, film, and broadcast media, recognize the tremendous value of their digital assets, and are continuing to ensure that they remain secure, accessible, and preserved over time.  If you are not already involved in this exciting area of information management, take some time to explore DAM related blogs, podcasts, and websites.  Searching for DAM related opportunities on various online job sites is another way to learn about the skills required by companies currently hiring DAM experts.  Once you begin your search, you just might be surprised what you discover.

Gayle Pellizzer is a recruiter at LAC Group. Gayle is a member of SLA’s Business & Finance and Knowledge Management Divisions.