Howdy from the beautiful Rocky Mountains! The Rocky Mountain chapter of SLA is thrilled to contribute this week’s FutureReady365 posts. We are a small, diverse community of 150+ members spread across a four-state region (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and South Dakota). We have a medley of posts from public school, government, higher education and independent professionals that we hope will prompt conversations, comments and thoughts on being future ready. Happy reading!

As the Colorado State Library public library consultant, I hear from library staff across the state – how can we reinvent ourselves as Anythink did in just a few years? Rangeview Library District and its Anythink libraries serve Adams County, Colo. Once the worst-funded library district in the state, Anythink has drastically reinvented itself with a new service philosophy, new spaces and a new challenger brand that has changed the perception of libraries in Adams County and beyond.

Over a cup of coffee with Anythink Director Pam Sandlian Smith, a concept was born. We sought to address the needs of libraries from Colorado and beyond that are interested in innovation, creativity and risk-taking, which led to R-Squared – The Risk & Reward Conference.

Is this a rehashing of what Anythink has done in order to achieve national recognition? Pam’s answer would be a definitive, “no!”  However, with a group of folks from Telluride on the Western Slope to Clearview on the Eastern Plains, a plan began to form that would highlight some of the philosophies and core values that have inspired Anythink’s reinvention.

With the help of the creative team from Ricochet Ideas and a committee of devoted individuals from across Colorado, we started work last February to define the conference. R-Squared is designed for professionals at all levels who are curious about creative thinking in libraries. The goal is for attendees to recognize their own creativity, analyze risk and reap its rewards, and become confident in creative problem solving to help establish libraries as leaders inspiring creative thinking in their communities. As Pam states, “It comes down to looking at our profession with a fresh perspective and having the courage to implement things differently. We have to be willing to take some risks to ensure our long-term survival.”

This conference is uniquely designed to encourage fun, creativity and risk in an unexpected format. What better place to do that than in Telluride, CO, one of the most beautiful and inspirational locations in Colorado. Time is built into the conference schedule for risk exercises and experience zones, and sessions allow for collaboration. The three-day conference deals with four main areas – culture, customer curiosity, abundant community and creative spaces. Creative experts and risk-takers from industries like hospitality, retail, marketing and technology will provide a fresh perspective and inspire innovation. As John Bellina, creative director for Ricochet Ideas says, “R-Squared is about embracing risk as a way to get ahead.”

To find out more about R-Squared – The Risk & Reward Conference, visit rsquaredconference.org, facebook/rsquaredconference, or follow us on Twitter @rsquaredconf.

Shelley Walchak is the Library Community Programs Senior Consultant at the Colorado State Library in the Department of Education. She assists public library administration with questions on planning, laws that affect libraries, advocacy, standards, board training, and special projects. Shelley has an MSLS from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.

30 Years ago I graduated from Library School – and the future was in front of me…
By Stephen Abram, Toronto Chapter, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Leadership & Management Divisions

Part 2
In part one I listed nine things I wished that my 1980 self (the freshly minted MLS) knew when I graduated in order to be future ready. Here’s another ten philosophies that I believe would help most people be more future ready (and I hope happy) :

1. Prefer Action over Study.
   If you or your team is studying something to death – remember that death was not the original goal! Although information professionals have a great core competency in research and study, we must know when to fish or cut bait. Recognize that studying something too long is staying in your comfort zone instead of making progress. In our somewhat risk-averse culture, this can be particularly difficult. What needs to be learned and understood is that delay is as big a risk as poorly considered action. Pilots and good process reduce your risk (and provide learning opportunities too). You can iterate your way to the future. This philosophy is closely related to the one where an enterprise values its conservative culture and gradually declines due to its lack of adaptation to modern expectations or changing external conditions.
2. Get Out of Your Box!
   It is unlikely that you are the alpha user profile. Understand that. I know that as an older, experienced librarian I am pretty limited in my ability to really connect and empathize with the challenges faced by newbie library, web or database searchers. I am not saying that I can’t overcome this, but I have to be explicitly aware that my training, biases and experiences have forever changed me and my perceptions of the information world. Also, my experiences are an old part of a different world and may not be fully relevant to today’s valid experiences of new librarians and end users. It also means that when I am designing services for seniors, kids, teens, challenged communities, the differently-abled, or even other professions like lawyers or engineers, I have to keep in mind that I need to be aware and prioritize their needs and competencies over my own. I need to build on their strengths and not repair them based on my perceptions of their weaknesses! I find that it pays to remind myself that I am not trying to create products and services for mini-librarians and that this is a poor goal in the first place. I need to understand the user’s context and needs and not project my own biases on them. For instance, it is likely that the end-user doesn’t actually want ‘information’ but, more likely, wants to be informed, entertained, taught and/or transformed in some manner. Libraries are great environments for that.
3. You can’t step in the same river twice
   This is ancient Confucian wisdom. It means, in our context, that our knowledge of new information or technology developments means that we probably cannot easily see all of the potential pitfalls or even its great potential. I remember when AltaVista was first introduced and many colleagues said that this couldn’t be the future of searching. After all, it had no fields, no true Boolean, and it didn’t allow the use of set searching! How could this be the future of online searching? Then along came relevancy ranking driven by the search engine’s algorithm – again pooh-poohed by my colleagues (and me for a while). Now along comes Blekko and I hear the same refrain. This time I am not so sure. After all, Google Scholar is still an infant. Can you point to someone’s beautiful baby and criticize her as being a lousy accountant? Keep yourself open to the movement of the river – it’s always changing and the river is strong. In the battle of the river and the rock, the river wins. Just look deep into the Grand Canyon and see the power (and beauty) of steady progress. Today we must invent a future for libraries that exists in a world of users who are literally changed in their perception of information use and the role of technology. Spend time understanding the beauty and strengths of your own box and then take a break outside of it occasionally.
4. Have a Vision and Dream BIG!
   “How will you shape the future?” When you try to be future focused and ready you are making a choice – to shape the future not just be ready for it. Have the confidence to build the future with your ideas and energy. I have seen the power of vision in every workplace I have been employed in. When it is absent or lost the workplace is missing something and verges on a horrible environment. When a shared vision is present we have achieved great things. When the vision doesn’t have enough stretch in it, things seem mediocre. Think back to great work environments you’ve worked in or great leaders you’ve worked for and you’ll usually find there were some great and compelling visions at work there. And for those who don’t dream big and have a vision, they’re doomed to an endless series of the present. I hope they love the way things are.
5. Ask the Three Magic Questions:
   a)What keeps you awake at night?
   b)If you could solve only one problem at work, what would it be?
   c)If you could change one thing and one thing only, what would it be?I have discovered that these questions are truly magic. They start conversations with users rather than delivering simple answers. They’re open-ended instead of closed-ended, yes or no answer questions. They avoid assumption. Just set the context and ask away. I have used these questions with primary school kids, titans of industry like Bill Gates, librarians, IT managers and cabinet ministers. These questions work every time to delve deeply into our users’ needs and personal goals. When we are armed with that knowledge then our libraries are unstoppable.
6. Feedback is a Gift
   One of my closest and dearest friends taught me this when In was having trouble dealing with a round of public and negative feedback. She told me that, like that wedding gift from Aunt Sally, you can keep it, display it, return it, or hide it in the closet. It’s your personal choice. Don’t overvalue one piece of out-of-context feedback or let it loom out of perspective and balance. I have learned over my life that objections to my ideas are best handled two ways: listening more, or framing the objection as an opportunity for more information and education. Feedback is best digested in the aggregate rather than in small doses. Squeaky wheels are fine and need to be oiled. But if it’s the engine that needs attention, then that poorly oiled wheel is just a distraction. Feedback shouldn’t be cause for stomach-wrenching stress. You are in control of how it can be dealt with (good or constructive or bad) and need to hear and accept this gift from your stakeholders. Do you have feedback mechanisms in your life?
7. Sacrifice is the Magic Sauce of Setting Priorities
   Every person and organization has thousands of ideas that are worthy of consideration. No one can do them all. That’s the tough part. When you have 100 good ideas to choose from the critical skill isn’t choosing the best 5 but sacrificing 95. Learn the skill of temporary sacrifice. You can store your good ideas in an idea parking lot and bring them forward into the strategic planning process as projects are completed. If you don’t focus and choose to limit your energy to achieving success on those that will deliver the most value to your enterprise and users, then you are choosing mediocrity. Sacrificing ideas isn’t forever or a loss. Time was invented so everything doesn’t happen all at once. Give your ideas time to grow and gain acceptance.
8. Build for the Future and Embrace Ambiguity
   Too often projects that are planned for 18-36 months naively assume that things will stay the same technologically. Remember the lessons of the past where the things mutated quickly – DOS became Windows, diskettes became CD-ROMs, Netscape begat MSIE which begat Firefox, online dial-up became web broadband, etc. You can’t be certain of the future but you can’t wait for total stability either. That’s the ambiguity. Dealing with ambiguity is a key competency in change management and introducing innovation. Stability is a chimera. Only fossils are truly stable.
9. No Mistake is Ever Final
   One of my better bosses had this phrase framed in needlepoint on the wall of her office. We were part of a skunkworks that was tasked with re-technologizing a major corporation as well as introducing transformational cultural change into a huge publishing sector. No small task. Not only did we make many mistakes, but we learned from them. If we weren’t making mistakes we weren’t trying hard enough. Albeit, we tried to limit the exposure of our experiments, but like learning to ride a bike, if you’re not falling down, you’re just not learning well enough. Her sign “No mistake is ever final” encourages us to try just that little bit harder to achieve greatness because we knew we had her support. If you want to change things for the better, you have to be a change agent and that means you have to be more comfortable with making mistakes and dealing with them effectively – and learning all the time.
10. Have some Fun!
    We are often too serious. Our work is serious and our impact on our communities and the world is enormous! However, working creatively, trying new things and being innovative is fun. Take the time to recognize that and live your life to the fullest. Celebrate your successes and your team’s work. Champion your library’s achievements! Reward your colleagues when they succeed. Don’t ever get so heads-down that you can’t see the big picture. It’s a wonderful world.

Congratulations to Cindy Romaine, SLA, and the SLA board and network for actively seeking the future for over 100 years. I am more future ready for having been involved with SLA and learning from such a great group of colleagues.

Stephen Abram, MLS is a Past President of SLA and is Vice President, Strategic Partnerships and Markets, for Gale Cengage Learning. He is an SLA Fellow and the past president of the Ontario Library Association and the Canadian Library Association. In June 2003 he was awarded SLA’s John Cotton Dana Award and the AIIP Roger Summit Award in 2009. In 2011 he is Canada’s CLA Outstanding Librarian of the Year. He is the author of Out Front with Stephen Abram and Stephen’s Lighthouse blog. Stephen would love to hear from you at stephen.abram@gmail.com.

Introduction (Toni Wilson)

This blog post, from an expert member of the CI Division, speaks to the importance of communicating the results of CI research effectively.  While we’ve been focusing to a large extent on the CI collection process this week, as it helps information professionals and their organizations become and remain ready for the future, communicating the findings from our CI collection efforts appropriately – so it’s absorbed and becomes part of the decision-making process – is absolutely critical.

Competitive intelligence (CI), at its most basic level can be defined as being future ready – or armed with the right information to the make the right decisions.  In this post-post modern, Web 3.0, social media, everything and intensely technology mediated world, information is ubiquitous.  Being “Future Ready” to me means being able to take information and elevate it by taking that information in whatever forms it comes and turning it into actionable intelligence.  Librarians or any information professional’s ability to turn reams of paper (or electronic documents) into a three-second sound byte or a neatly parsed phrase that holds meaning and contains value is the essence of being future ready.  In some respects, being future ready for special librarians engaged in CI is a matter of perspective and semantics.  For example, what the competitive intelligence world calls Early Warning Systems, librarians might call Current Awareness.  To be future ready, it’s time to stop thinking about research questions and to start thinking about business problems and how information-turned-into-CI, with the help of analysis, can help organizations solve their business problems with an eye to the future.

Zena Applebaum is a competitive intelligence professional at Bennett Jones LLP, a Canadian law firm.  She writes articles for industry publications and blogs regularly regarding topics important to the successful practice of CI.  Zena is currently the CI Division’s Vendor Relations Chair.

by Paul T. Jackson, Trescott Research

© March, 2011

“People are resilient because they have to be…although the scars never disappear totally.”

By the time Naisbitt came out with his book Megatrends 2000 wherein he said people would likely have 4 or 5 careers, I was already on my sixth career track. Here are some lessons about being flexible and adaptable and future ready from those six careers.

Lesson 1:  Be open to new possibilities.

Over time I’ve experienced many successful endeavors simply by allowing them to happen and doing my best at the tasks given.

Without a job, and while attending a performance of the Royal Ballet of England in Detroit, I was standing next to an older gentleman.  We found we had mutual friends and interests, and I was invited to a late night dinner with him. Our dinner conversation led me to my library career under Kurtz Myers, head of the Detroit Public Library Music Department.

Years later, after my university position ended, I went to the office supply store to get some copy paper for my old wet copier.  The proprietor showed me the new 3M dry toner copier, and after looking at the copy sample, I exclaimed, “Wow, I could sell this!”  The proprietor said, “You’re on. When can you start?” Thus started a career of selling office supply and machines; helping people organize their files and paper processes. This knowledge and work eventually brought me to learning and selling computers and a partnership with a computer firm helping build databases for companies and organizations.

In all of these positions I was using all of my knowledge and past experience in libraries, music publishing, research, writing, and office supply and able to do a superior performance because of it.

Lesson 2:  Be Inquisitive and ask questions.   It can lead to new ventures.

In undergraduate school, a philosophy professor had told me, “Solutions start with questions.”

At library school I felt there was a need for an organization whose archives of recorded sound could come together to share information.  I wrote and asked the curator of the Ford Museum collection, Frank Davis, what it would take to get these and other archivists together. His response was, “First, we have to have a meeting.”  This led to several meetings including an exploratory one with 22 librarians and archivists attending. They represented the largest collections of recordings in the United States.  We met in June of 1965 at Greenfield Village/Ford Museum after the American Library Association conference in Detroit.  We met again at Syracuse University, and there, in 1966, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) was founded with over 40 people attending, representing not only U.S. collections and archives, but also Canadian broadcasting and the United Nations sound recording libraries.  ARSC ( http://arsc-audio.org/ ) is now in its 45th year of existence. It only takes a question, and action, to start something significant.

Lesson 3: Give Responsibility; Take Responsibility

As a supervisor it is your job, your responsibility, to help those you supervise. This includes mentoring and developing your staff. You need to be able to teach them to take over your job, or at least keep the place operational if you are not there; no one should feel threatened by this.  It is making things better, even people.

I gave inmates responsibility to operate their prison library and law library.  They came back with ideas, they helped with grant writing, they improved services, and they took turns running the classes on writing business plans, legal research, and helping in the reading lab.  I helped train them on computers. The Corrections Accreditation Commission reported twice, our library “second to none [in the nation]” over the 8 plus years I was Director. Great things happen to your staff and their self-esteem when they have responsibility.

Lesson 4: Focus on problems–It’s not about you or me.

Someone on staff takes credit for your idea—get over it!

You have to change to smaller space—get over it!

Someone damages your ego—get over it!

Your library closes—get over it!

None of these things are important to the business of solving problems for the employer or customers.  I’ve survived all these things and in the end found solving problems was more important than who got credit. The programs I’ve helped build have survived, which to me is vastly more important.

At the music publishing group, TRO, Inc. representing over 32 publishers in 18 countries, the executives were often arguing, but once the problem was solved or the action agreed upon and discharged, they would be seen heading out the door for lunch together.

Remembering what you learned makes you so much more valuable for the next job.  Get over the closing and go on. Solving problems for the company, the employees, the customers, is the mission of every employee. This is what is remembered.

Lesson 5:  Think altruistically about leaving!

Leave something better than expected.

Growing up, my mother taught us we were to leave things better. I’m not rich financially. My career didn’t follow a well thought out plan.  It wasn’t something I started out to do.  Along the way I created new libraries, new businesses, and helped establish a national association.  I count myself a success.  When you get done, (do we ever get done?) by being resilient and practicing the lessons, you too can say, “I did good.”

Two of my favorite quotes:

“Remember, to get anything done, you first have to start.”

“The one who says it can’t be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.”

Mr. Jackson is an Information Specialist. A retired Special Librarian in Academic, Public, Corporate, and Prison libraries, he has taught research to Ph.D. candidates, and published a wide variety of articles. He is currently Editor of Plateau Area Writers Association’s Quarterly and anthology series, Contrasts. He is a member of several musical ensembles and volunteers as church librarian.  His career positions are recorded in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who International, and a profile at his web site: www.trescottresearch.com

by Kevin Carroll, Kevin Carroll Katalyst LLC

Think back to your childhood and to the years dominated by playtime, when there were endless hours to fill and the only agenda was to be captivated in the moment, to have fun. But playtime was also productive time, even if as kids we did not realize it. What we thought was entertaining was also instructive. Activities we called tea party, show-and-tell, kick-ball, finger-painting, hide-and-seek, daydreaming, and tag were also exercises in planning, strategy, design, decision-making, creativity, risk-taking, conflict resolution and teamwork.

In play we did not avoid obstacles, we looked for them by voluntarily challenging ourselves. We eagerly tackled insurmountable odds—height, speed, lack of money—to make our desires reality. Using imagination, we climbed Mt. Everest, competed in the Super Bowl, conquered the world or made a house out of a cardboard box. We voluntarily tested ourselves and accepted failure as part of the play. We ran, stumbled, and got up to run again. When we lost a game we simply started a new one. When something did not pan out as intended, we tapped into our seemingly endless supply of cleverness, resourcefulness and/or our creative agility to prototype or experiment with new solutions until we were satisfied. When faced with an enemy or new challenge—be it a competing team, a broken toy, or our friend playing a cop to our robber, an ogre to our princess—we figured out how to win, remedy the malfunction, or flee the imagined danger.

Far from frivolous time, our childhood play was constructive because it strengthened our resolve as well as our skills. Play gave us courage and instilled confidence. No doubt about it, the many forms of play—board games, sports, pretending, arts-and-crafts, writing, exploring, building—required us to invent, analyze, innovate, socialize, plan, communicate and problem solve. Play was serious business in our youth and play should continue to be serious business in our adult life.

Lifelong Play + Creative Confidence = Future Ready!

Kevin Carroll is the founder of Kevin Carroll Katalyst/LLC and the author of three highly successful books: Rules of the Red Rubber Ball, What’s Your Red Rubber Ball?! and The Red Rubber Ball at Work. As an author, speaker and agent for social change (a.k.a. the Katalyst), it is Kevin’s “job” to inspire businesses, organizations and individuals – from CEOs and employees of Fortune 500 companies to schoolchildren – to embrace their spirit of play and creativity to maximize their human potential and sustain more meaningful business and personal growth.

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University

I was pleasantly surprised to become aware of the Future Ready 365 blog, and I’ll look forward to acquiring some good ideas from colleagues who are confronting the challenge of building a sustainable, resilient library. I’ve been writing and speaking about future-proofing for approximately the past two years, and have shared a number of ideas for ways in which librarians in all sectors of the profession can create libraries that are ready for whatever the future might hold. I first became interesting in pursuing this topic when I was asked to contribute to Library Journal’s issue on “Future Proofing Your Library”. I wrote:

Adopting new skills and new techniques to our work will help, but I also advocate that library workers need to take a whole new approach to how they identify problems and develop the right solutions. Design thinking is all about being a “problem finder” and then thoughtfully developing, in playfully creative ways and in teams of border-crossing professionals, appropriate solutions. A significant challenge for library workers is keeping up with user expectations. If we fail to provide our users with an experience that meets their expectations, then we lose, and in a hypercompetitive and hyperconsumptive society, that can be the greatest challenge to our long-term viability.

We must use design thinking to create great library experiences for our users, because when people can get their information anywhere, all that can differentiate our libraries is the unique experience we can deliver—but it must be based on personal relationships, it must deliver meaning to the user, and it must be well designed.

Any number of strategies may contribute to the librarian’s effort to create a future ready library. I offer a dozen such strategies in my article “Fit Libraries Are Future-Proof.” Some of the strategies are inspired by library practitioners; others come from for- and non-profit industries. The overarching philosophy that unites them is the design thinking approach, seeing oneself as a professional who brings intentional design to creating a future ready library. The point is that becoming future ready or future proof requires more than the occasional random actions and occurrences that move us forward incrementally. It demands intentional design. I hope others will take the time to follow the links in this post to learn more about design thinking and how it can contribute to a creating a fit library that is ready for anything the future throws our way.

Steven Bell is the Associate University Librarian at Temple University. He blogs at Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog, and Designing Better Libraries, and is coauthor of Academic Librarianship by Design. Learn more about his ideas on design thinking and user experience at stevenbell.info/design and http://dbl.lishost.org. You can follow Steven Bell at http://twitter.com/blendedlib.

by Diana Menashi

One topic that has been raised by my professors regarding the future of the field is the relationship between librarianship and technologies, such as e-readers (Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes and Noble’s Nook), social networking sites (Facebook), and an ever-expanding selection of search engines from Google to Bing. The popularity and frequency of use of these technologies raises the question as to the role of libraries and librarians and the way in which they are perceived by the community at large and/or by corporations in the present information age. There are those who argue that the presence of these technologies renders or has rendered libraries and their services obsolete. Still, there are those who argue that the information searching and research skills of librarians are invaluable and will continue to be so as the ease of access to information increases.

Libraries and librarians have addressed this issue by maintaining an active online presence on the Internet through social networks, and by promoting services through library websites. This serves as an example of the ways in which the field considers users’ needs and desires when identifying platforms that would be most effective at providing services.

I would like to see the profession ‘reborn’ in the minds of those who perceive libraries and librarians as antiquated artifacts of the pre-information age. I would like to see libraries and librarians demonstrate that skills such as online searching are much more complex than a search engine would have one believe – that constructing a search query requires deeper thought and consideration beyond imputing two or three word phrases into a search box. I would like to see librarians show their users that the skill set that they have acquired and developed over the years goes beyond tasks such as reference services and cataloging.

Librarians should conceive of ways in which to demonstrate that their skills could be used to directly impact the success of the firm or the corporation. Librarians should breathe new life into the profession by stepping beyond the desk, identifying problem areas, and using their skill set to determine a possible solution. Their skill set would provide a unique perspective on the problem which would serve as an additional option for the heads of the firm or the corporation to consider when devising a solution. This would dispel the idea that librarians’ skill sets can be easily duplicated by computer programs and machines which serves as evidence that human involvement is still a necessity and an invaluable tool within the information age. Librarians should continue to develop Knowledge Management so that it is easily understood by those not versed in it. This could ease librarians’ attempts to explain its purpose and therefore increase the extent to which it is sought out by users and applied by librarians which would be mutually beneficial to both parties.

Diana Menashi is an MLS student at St. John’s University with a concentration is in special libraries. She is planning to take courses in law librarianship to acquire an additional skill set.