The Division of Government Information is delighted to be posting on the Future Ready 365 blog this week. DGI is a diverse community of knowledgeable information professionals who share an interest in government information and government librarianship. Our posts this week come from librarians in a variety of government library environments including federal, military, and academic. These DGI blog contributors share their insights on navigating the complicated landscape that today’s information professional must travel — from getting that library job to staying on top in a rapidly changing field once you’re there. Maybe you’d like to join us on the journey! Come check out the Division of Government Information at:  http://govinfo.sla.org/.

It doesn‘t exactly take a rocket scientist to notice that libraries have changed more in the last couple of decades than they did in the century before that. When I started in this business, I learned how to order LC cards using paper forms. Last week I used the web-based administrative module of a vendor to link our ILS with the vendor‘s database of periodical articles. This represents a sea change in our profession. Again, not rocket science, but of more than passing interest to practitioners.

I‘m privileged to work in a medium-sized library that supports a small school providing mid-career graduate education to military officers. The service we give them was unimaginable two decades ago. We have people in our organization who seriously propose getting rid of a library that has been in place for a century because everything you need to know is on the web. Technological change has weaseled its way into our hearts.

This isn’t a paean to the forgotten days of yore. Libraries are better, and a hell of a lot better, than they were when I started. In 1972, when I slithered into my first professional job, no one seriously considered that it could ever be possible to hand a college student everything he needed to complete a term paper in five minutes. No one had even heard of unmediated database searching. Of course, that was the year before we got electricity and sold the mule.

Change is good. Change is life. Our business is different now, and will be ridiculously, revoltingly different in another decade. Yeah, yeah, grandpa, so what?

Well, the So What is that managers have to deal with the change. I have multicultural employees, patrons from eighty-seven countries (this year), and people whose business, maybe their physical survival, is dependent on the newest news, the latest research, the best understanding of something they never heard of before last week. Right now, the way to do that is a mix of mediated and unmediated searching, wide-ranging database access, good connectivity, careful attention to collection development, and comprehensive personal service. My building is going to be renovated starting this fall and I have to figure out how to keep services going. High excitement!

Well, never mind. We‘ll work it out. Libraries can do this stuff. Librarians can do this stuff. And we will.

Ed Burgess is the director of the Combined Arms Research Library in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is practicing to become a windy curmudgeon in his old age.

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.

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.

DOD Academic Librarians anticipate a future that looks like this:

• The shift from print resources to electronic resources to increase dramatically. The reference collection will disappear, along with the journal stacks.
• Library space will open up for group collaboration, non-traditional classroom spaces, and labs.
• Libraries will be seen less as “place” and more as “resource” and “service.”
• Our staff will communicate electronically more than we do face to face.
• Blended and distance learning will be a driving force in this shift.
• Our users will demand mobility — 24/7 access to content and services from anywhere, anytime on any device.
• The growing number of mobile devices will also impact the way patrons access our collections. Our jobs as librarians will be to not only bridge the electronic resources to the patrons but also educate them on use and functionality.
• We must be mobile savvy. With the influx of mobile phone technology in smart phones, tablets, and e-readers, librarians will need to be able to assist customers who want to use these devices to facilitate their learning and curriculum goals.
• We will adapt to the “consumerization of IT.” Our staff and our customers will take for granted the integration of products used at home with products used at work. The lines between traditional library services and traditional IT services will become increasingly fuzzy.
• Libraries, and by extension IT departments, are going to have to start integrating new policies and procedures to guide workers’ use of these devices. This is a significant challenge for Department of Defense Libraries, given security and Information Assurance requirements. We must find a way to ensure that new technologies, delivery systems, and information “containers” are compatible with security regulations.
• We will continue to digitize – to make available our unique resources beyond the confines of DOD libraries – historical documents from World War II, the Vietnam War, Desert I and Desert II, for example.
• Our academic libraries will continue to be more closely aligned with the teaching process. We will be more involved in course design and development.

Many thanks to: Ed Burgess, Army Command and General Staff College; Dave Coleman, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies; Jason Girard, Joint Forces Staff College; Dr. Jeff Luzius, Air University; and Eleanor Uhlinger, Naval Postgraduate School for their help with this post!

Dr. Gail Nicula (Virginia Chapter, Military Libraries Division) is the library director at the Ike Skelton Library, Joint Forces Staff College, Norfolk, VA. She is also an adjunct faculty member in the College of Business and Public Administration, Old Dominion University.

Ed Burgess (Heart of America Chapter, Government Information and Military Libraries Division) is the director of the Combined Arms Research Library in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is practicing to become a windy curmudgeon in his old age.

Dave Coleman is the webpage manager and reference librarian for the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii.

Jason Girard is on staff at the Ike Skelton Library, Joint Forces Staff College, Norfolk, VA.

Dr. Jeff Luzius is the director of the Fairchild Research Information Center at Air University. Dr. Luzius also is an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama in the School of Library & Information Science.

Eleanor Uhlinger is the Library Director at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.

By Marydee Ojala

As we all strive for a state of future readiness—while recognizing that the future will inevitably arrive whether we’re ready or not—let’s not forget our past. I was extraordinarily fortunate to work for BankAmerica Corporation in my first professional position after earning my MLS. I became enthralled by the story of the founding of the library in 1922 at what was then Bank of Italy. (The name changed to Bank of America in 1930.)

The first librarian, K. Dorothy Ferguson, didn’t answer a job ad. She wasn’t promoted from within. She certainly didn’t find the position through Monster.com or craigslist. She didn’t go through traditional channels for a very good reason. There was no job. There was no library. There was no bank employee thinking, “Gee, we really need a corporate library.”

It was Ferguson herself who created the job. She approached A.P. Giannini, the legendary entrepreneur who started Bank of Italy in 1904, and said, “To be a great bank, you need a financial library. Moreover, you need me to organize it for you.” He hired her. The bank prospered. She stayed with the bank until 1943, when she resigned to establish libraries in Africa and Asia under the auspices of the British government.

A strong advocate of SLA, Ferguson was the first president of the San Francisco Chapter (1924-25) and served a second term as president in 1938-39. She became national chairman of the Financial Group, which evolved into the Business and Finance Division, in 1927. On the job, she demonstrated strong marketing skills. By 1923, she had a regular column about the library in the employee newsletter, explaining how it could benefit bank employees.

Today, as we contemplate how to prove the value of libraries and information professionals, we try not to “preach to the choir” by getting “outside the echo chamber.” Ferguson, in the 1930s, was publishing articles in journals read by bankers, not librarians. Web 2.0? Obviously, Ferguson lived in a pre-internet world. But she continually stressed that library services were not confined to the physical premises of the library. She championed information sources beyond books and beyond the library’s walls. The library’s slogan—”When in need of data, consult our library”—resonates still.

The attributes I admire in K. Dorothy Ferguson are ones that I think make modern information professionals future ready. She was fearless, with a strong belief in her own abilities and convinced of the power of information. She seized opportunities, made her own luck, and creatively transformed her professional life. Future ready? Yes, she was. Follow her example, and you can be future ready, too.

You can read a fuller account of Ferguson’s career in an article I wrote to celebrate the San Francisco Bay Region’s 75th anniversary in May 1989.

Marydee Ojala edits ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals and writes its business research column (“The Dollar Sign”). She contributes feature articles and news stories to Information Today, Searcher, EContent, Computers in Libraries, Intranets, Cyber Skeptic’s Guide to the Internet, Business Information Review, and Information Today‘s NewsBreaks. Her blog is ONLINEInsider.net. She plans conference programs for Internet Librarian International (London, UK), WebSearch University (various sites in the U.S. and Europe), and Buying & Selling eContent. A long-time observer of the information industry, she speaks frequently at conferences, such as WebSearch University, Computers in Libraries, Internet Librarian, Online Information (London, UK), INFORUM (Prague), Southern African Online Meeting, Internet Librarian International, and national library meetings outside the U.S. She has adjunct faculty status at the School of Library and Information Science at IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis) teaching business information resources and online searching. Her professional career began at BankAmerica Corporation, San Francisco, directing a worldwide program of research and information services. She established her independent information research business in 1987, both in Denmark and the U.S. She serves as Past President for the Indiana chapter of SLA, and is an active member of IFLA’s Library Theory & Research Standing Committee and IOLUG (Indiana Online User Group). Her undergraduate degree is from Brown University and her MLS was earned at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kathy Coorsh, Toronto Chapter, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Knowledge Management and Leadership & Management Divisions

As a librarian who has undergone some significant changes over the past year or two, I thought I should share my experiences. Organizational changes brought my library under a new VP who asked all the “hard” questions about library services & facilities, and came to the conclusion, not completely unjustified, nor unexpected, that it was time for a change. We cut our print collection by 2/3, reduced the library footprint by probably more than that & created “archives” on a separate floor. However, I was assured repeatedly that there was still a role required for reduced library services in the organization and, more importantly, that he valued my skills and experience but felt that I could deploy them in other areas of our operations. So now in addition to providing library services, albeit quite curtailed, as you can imagine, I am also responsible for establishing and maintaining our social media presence and am involved in other areas which I had not been previously.

So, after some 20+ years it is quite a change, but, so far so good. I am enjoying most of the changes & new functions & learning a lot! While I do wish I had the luxury of providing the kind of library services I know would be beneficial & useful, the reality of the situation is that greater organizational needs exist elsewhere. I’m just grateful that my professional skills and all the continuing ed. courses, conferences & readings helped me keep stay ahead of the curve of new trends, innovations and technology that facilitated my move into this new area.

I should also point out that while our print collection was cut significantly we do still have an active and expanding digital collection. The organization is still committed to a reduced library.

Kathy (Katalin) Coorsh has been a practicing professional librarian for over 30 years. She started at Concordia University (Sir George Williams University) in Montreal as Public Services and Orientation Librarian for over 6 years then worked as librarian for non-profit organizations after moving to Toronto in 1980. She has been Chief Librarian with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business since 1984. She received her MLS from McGill University, Montreal and her BA from Sir George Williams University, Montreal.

by Hal Kirkwood, Indiana Chapter, Business & Finance, Competitive Intelligence Divisions

‘Alice remarked in great surprise, “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! In our country, you’d generally get to somewhere else if you ran very fast for a long time.”’

“A slow sort of country!” replied the Queen. “Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

An article that I have kept and reread over and over is by Arnold Hirshon in Advances in Librarianship entitled ‘Running with the Red Queen: Breaking New Habits to Survive in the Virtual World’. In this article he talks about reinventing reference, meeting increased customer expectations, changing strategic directions, changing our physical spaces, changing how we collaborate, coping with the speed of technological change, and integrating technology effectively.

This article was written in 1996.

These issues are as relevant now as they were 15 years ago. The competition from Google, the multitude of technological options available, the need for building information literacy skills, the necessity to change our physical spaces and how we connect with our constituents are all challenges we as information professionals must face today. We must define our role. We must create the future. To remain relevant we have to run twice as fast to get anywhere, this is what Future Ready means to me.

Hal Kirkwood is the Associate Head of the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics at Purdue University. He is a past-chair of the Business & Finance Division.
Hal is currently running for one of the two Director positions on the SLA Board. He can be reached at kirkwood@purdue.edu.

The role of information services in global/IT consulting companies (6/16/2011)

Reposted with permission from DC/SLA Radio

by BP Prakash, Asian Chapter, Business & Finance, Competitive Intelligence, Science-Technology Divisions

On June 16, 2011, BP Prakash, General Manager of the Library & Information Center at Tata Consultants spoke about managing a global information center from an international perspective. Mr. Prakash is also the President of SLA’s Asia Chapter, the fastest growing chapter in the Association and has a compelling vision of the future of the profession!

To play the podcast, please go to the DC/SLA Radio site http://dc.sla.org/2011/06/16/mumbai/

At TCS, Mr Prakash, directs one of the largest and diverse informational professional team in Asia.He has successfully lead his team to win SLA B&F’s ” Centre of Excellence Award”, in 2009. He has PG degrees in Development planning and Library Science from Univ of Mysore, Karnataka state, India. An university gold medalist in library science, he is also a Fulbright scholar from Univ of Wisconsin, USA.

Mr. Prakash has 27 years of experience across national institutes, manufacturing sectors, global IT firms & research environments. He enjoys professional interactions & believes that learning is a continual process. He is a life member of Indian library associations and has been a member of SLA since 1999. He feels librarianship is at crossroads today and organizations like SLA have a major responsibility in shaping the future of librarians.

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.