by Sara Batts, Europe Chapter, Legal, Business & Finance, Leadership & Management Divisions

Career-changing is flexibility in action. It’s being comfortable with the mindset that takes everything you know in one arena, chews it up, spits it out and moves on, adapting your skills and working styles to a new environment. This is my second career and one that, like many, I stumbled across serendipitously. (Saying ‘by accident’ sounds a little harsh, but it’s not far off.) There are a whole host of people’s stories at the Library Routes project and mine’s not unique. What has Future Ready come to mean? For me it’s been about throwing myself in the deep end: connecting with my professional peers via the UK’s BIALL and CLIG and globally via SLA; seeking to learn about new tools, new areas, and new ways of working. We career-changing new entrants bring great attitudes to the Future Ready party. We’re here because we choose to be: this is our profession and of course we’re going to promote our value and our worth. What’s this shy-and-retiring stereotype all about anyway? Whose rules are those to say what is and isn’t an information professional? And we’re not restricted by how things used to be or how we’ve always done things – we want to do what works now, and what will work tomorrow. We have already re-invented ourselves once: in my case from conference organiser to legal specialist; and from non-participant to unit leader – re-evaluating our role is second nature. We’ve been Future Ready since our first day at library school.

Sara Batts is SLA Europe’s president and is also involved a member of several divisions including Legal and LMD. She has been involved with SLA since winning one of SLA Europe’s early career conference awards in 2009 and is one of 2011’s Rising Stars. She’s been Senior Research Librarian in the London office of law firm Reed Smith for three years.

by Pamela Wall

OK, already! I get it. I really do.

In order to be Future Ready, you have to be actively getting ready. You (and when I say you, I really mean me) can not be on the sidelines anymore believing that the skills gathered and gleaned to prepare the library and the library professional for the twenty-first century and centuries to come should be put on a shelf somewhere awaiting some perfect time.

According to a blog post I read recently, the future is now. Waiting for some mystical, magical, and mysterious time is not the wisest course of action and continuing to wait while not putting any of my hard-earned professional skills to use is tantamount to malpractice. Malpractice was the theme of another post. I just want to let you (this time, I really mean you) know that I’ve been inspired by someone else’s original thoughts. The rest that follows really is mine. With this post, I am not trying to revolutionize anyone. I am only trying to revolutionize myself. Keeping that in mind, this is what I resolve to do.

I will work hard to organize my library. I inherited the library at the engineering firm for which I work from another co-worker. You may be saying “OK. Big deal!” To those of you who uttered that thought, allow me to tell you that the co-worker who organized the library was not a librarian. I am not sure that she has ever worked in one. I am sure that she’s been to one because she worked for months to get the collection in order. She used what skills she had to generate call numbers for each of the books. She got the library together without the assistance of any library professional and for that, I commend her. She subsequently left the company, and the library became my responsibility. I had absolutely no idea how to manage it. I knew that the call number system of Book1, Book2, etc. was no longer appropriate especially since materials were coming into the library that belonged between Book1 and Book2. One thing I did was to enroll my pretty self in an accredited Library Science program. I have also begun to broker discussions with a real librarian, and she helped me to select a real, viable system for organization. With other relationships I will develop and the techniques I will learn, I will analyze what is done to manage collections and use those methods to manage my own.

The engineering firm for which I work has four engineers in our office. You may be thinking “Four engineers? Big deal!” To you I say that they are some of the best I’ve ever worked with, and in our town, my little firm has an excellent reputation. I can certainly say that they’ve been able to keep this sister in soft shoes for the past nine-plus years. They are not walking around the office saying, “Well, when we get 15 P.E.’s on staff, then we’ll really be awesome.” They are not waiting for that. The standard of care for engineers states that they will exhibit quality workmanship for all projects on which they work. The standard of care does not say that they have to have a labor force of a certain size to produce quality. This principle works for one as well as it works for 1,000. As the engineers in my office are doing, I will most emphatically do. I am the only librarian (well, not a real librarian. I don’t have my degree yet) on staff, but I will not wait for an increase in the company’s labor force or the library’s collection before I can exhibit the quality of my profession. I will do these things and more so that my library and I are Future Ready. My co-laborers in the information field, this is my standard of care…my resolution.

Pamela Wall is a student in the MLS program at the North Carolina Central University.

Jill Blaemers,  San Diego Chapter Director; Taxonomy and Social Science Divisions

Cindy Romaine has challenged us each to become future-ready, that is, to prepare ourselves for our desired future. In considering how I want to respond to that challenge, I am reminded of a conversation I had many years ago, with an executive at the company I worked for at the time. He asked me where I wanted to be in five years. The smart, albeit cliché, response would have been to tell him that I wanted to be in his job in three years, but, nope, that’s not how I think. Instead, I told him that, in looking ahead, what I saw was a continuing evolution in how we organize, disseminate, and access information, and that our roles in it were going to need to evolve as well; I wanted to contribute to figuring the whole scheme out. Staking a claim to one particular route to the future wasn’t to me then, and it isn’t now, a viable option for an individual or a company.

We each sit in the midst of a constantly changing reality that is the result, at any given instant of time, of a myriad of individual, social unit, and societal-level decisions, small and momentous, all influenced by factors in the natural world. Not to be trite, but change is endemic to the human condition, so to be future-ready, we need to be eyes wide open to its fact and its force.  What we need to focus on is our contribution, as information professionals, to creating whatever that future looks like, and to be ready for that requires a certain mindset, attitude, and action, the point Cindy makes.

To me, being future-ready means many things. Personally and professionally, the minimum requirements are resilience and adaptability. Future-ready means bringing my skills of assessment and analysis to the status quo, as well as skepticism to calls for change for change’s sake and speed for speed’s sake. It means being ready and willing to get my hands dirty today with the hard work of implementing change that makes sense for tomorrow, at the same time scanning and evaluating the external environment for opportunities and threats, all with an eye on the horizon. It means a personal and professional commitment to lifelong learning and the incredibly lofty, yet so critical, goal of achieving an information-literate society in a world where information is seemingly available to everyone while, at the same time, a digital divide persists. Fundamentally, it means a laser focus on doing my best to help connect users with authoritative, accessible, actionable information.

Jill Blaemers is an information industry veteran, currently working independently providing consulting services related to product development of electronic academic reference databases and assessment of user needs and market conditions/opportunities. She serves as a Director on the Board of SLA – San Diego, and is a member of the SLA Social Science and Taxonomy Divisions.

by Dianna Roberts, Australia and New Zealand Chapter, Transportation Division

Our Information Centre has always been well-positioned in the company especially as our two most recent Chief Executives had wives who were librarians. We now have a new, young and dynamic CE with a non-librarian wife and who is making lots of changes, all of which I support, but like many of you I suffer from what I refer to as ‘librarians’ paranoia,” i.e. the fear of being seen as irrelevant and potentially disposable.

My immediate manager has been asking questions which were making me feel nervous, such as “what would it cost the company NOT to have the Information Centre?”, but I knew I’d done all I could to present a positive image with glowing feedback and value statements that proved our worth, and that any outcome was probably now beyond my control. So this morning I was very pleasantly surprised (almost shocked!) to be told that the company wants us to move beyond being viewed as “the library” and to take on a more active role of Information Management with ownership of functions such as EDRMS, e-learning, KM and anything else I can suggest.

We currently have a staff of only 2.5 FTE who serving a population of 2,500 in four different countries. Our main focus has been on indepth research, document supply and alerting services so taking on these wider roles will mean expanding our staff and learning new skills. It will also provide us with more authoritative position in the company.

What an exciting year it is going to be.

Dianna Roberts is the Manager of the Information Centre at Opus International Consultants Ltd.

by Gretchen Leslie, Oregon Chapter, Science-Technology Division

I am writing this post because I believe we, as an association, have not really done a good job of researching our industry—the information industry—and using that research to better position our members  and our association in the future.  We talk about being “Future Ready,” but I have not seen us applying our core research competencies to scoping where the growth is and what the trending is in the information industry, what skills we need to find work in the coming information industry scenario, who our potential partners can be, and where the hidden snakes lay on our path to the future.  The research, data, and analysis are out there, generated by companies such as Outsell Inc., Simba, IDC, and Gartner.  Are we using it?  If not, why not?

So I guess this post is a call to action for the association leadership to begin a program to buy and use the published research about the information industry. Perhaps we could even partner with other associations, and cooperatively build a sustainable way to get the needed data and analysis on a continual basis.  That way, we could always benchmark on where we are as informational professionals, vs. where the information industry is headed.

What do the rest of you think of this “info pros – research thyself!” approach to mapping out what Future Ready means?  I’d like to hear from my colleagues in SLA about the idea of using market research on ourselves; making market research of the information industry part of our websites and continuing education, applying the ideas of where the information industry is moving to how and what we teach in information science graduate programs, and ultimately, building a better understanding of the global information industry and where we fit in the future as information professionals.

Gretchen Leslie has a 35+ year career in special libraries, and has always wondered why we cannot do a better job of analyzing our own industry.

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 Janice LaChance, Chief Executive Officer of SLA

“If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.” – Eric Shinseki, U.S. Secretary of Veteran Affairs and former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army

This is one of my favorite quotes from someone I greatly admire. To me, it sums up the situation we all find ourselves in today. Even when Eric Shinseki was born in 1942, everyone was feeling the pressure to change on one level or another. Politicians, soldiers, salespeople, advertisers, accountants, and yes, even SLA members, were encountering new technologies to use, policies to follow, expectations to fulfill, and lessons to pass on to the next generation of pioneers.

It seems one of the few things that hasn’t changed over the years is the constancy of change itself. So, why is there so much emphasis on change now if it’s old news?

Because we’ve seldom encountered change of this pace or magnitude before. Everything—from your workplace to your organization’s strategy to the phone you use to the car you drive to the road you drive it on—will be different in five years. The occurrence and pace of change are out of our control. The way in which we choose to change is not. We must not simply change, but progress.

Sure, as information and knowledge professionals, SLA members are hearing about the importance of being future-ready perhaps more than others, but all professions are being called upon to learn new skills and adapt to a new world of work. If you’re an SLA member, you’re not in it alone.

We have a vast yet tight-knit community that acts as a support structure to all our members—and this blog is just one of the many things that bring us together. SLA has conducted alignment research that is unprecedented within the profession, and that research has shown us the way to introducing new professional development programs and educational resources. SLA is faced with the task of providing relevant resources to librarians in medical hospitals in India and information analysts in top law firms in the United States, and everyone in between. While the context of knowledge delivery and use is unique across the globe, the necessity to adapt is not.

I’ll leave you with some of SLA’s resources included with your membership, many resulting from the alignment research and all focused on the task of giving a diverse membership tools to better meet the demands of information users across the globe.

• SLA’s 23 Things – Deb Hunt, along with MLIS grad student Kim McGrath, worked together to update this weekly learning program. I think you’ll like what’s new here; see week 6 for updated social networking and learning. This program was created by our members, for our members.
• Atomic Learning – This resource often gets passed over, but it shouldn’t. From beginner to expert level, from Sharepoint to Delicious, these easy videos are a fun and easy way to learn at your own pace.
• Alignment Toolkit –Look for tools, based on the alignment research, to be unveiled starting April 1^st and leading up to SLA 2011. Writing Your Own Marketing Plan, Dictionary of Future Ready Terms, and SLA Tools for LIS Students will be among the first resources provided.
• This blog – Our strongest asset is…ourselves! No, sometimes we don’t all have time to read the blog every day, but the good thing is we can catch up at any point in time. We’re up to about 60 posts already (way to go, Cindy and team!). So read, discuss, and try a post of your own sometime in 2011.
• Click U – Ask the Copyright Experts, Social Media Research for Business, Moving into Management.  From in-person classes to online webinars, free and paid, these opportunities are scattered throughout the year.
• Information Outlook – Read our latest issue online. Don’t miss the articles on mobile applications; one could give you an idea to change your organization for the better.

So don’t look at Future Ready as a goal for just 2011, because it’s more than that. Treat it as something to embrace, a way of thinking. It’s not only about seeking out opportunities, but looking forward to those opportunities with the confidence of preparation and positivity. The world is driving forward, upward, and outward, and I’ve seen more than enough evidence from SLA’s outstanding membership to know that we can be right there in the driver’s seat.

Janice Lachance, SLA’s Chief Executive Officer since 2003, is a popular speaker and commentator and the champion, spokesperson and global ambassador for SLA and its 11,000 members working in 75 countries on five continents.  Before joining SLA, she was a management consultant to nonprofit and membership organizations in the areas of strategic planning, organization transformation, and culture change.

by Rachel Wangerin, SLA Minnesota President

Had someone told me in library school that I would one day go on to become the president of the SLA MN chapter, I would have thought they were crazy. But here I am, 6 years after graduation, doing just that. The main advice I heard, whether just out of undergraduate school, or after receiving my Master’s degree, was network, network, network. So much so that it almost felt like a dirty word. One secret that they don’t tell you is that once you start participating in a professional organization (and I mean participating, not just joining) the networking starts to come naturally. Another secret that isn’t apparent is that participating in a professional organization can add to your professional development every bit as much as work inside your own organization.

I had the opportunity to begin my information career working with individuals with a huge amount of experience and knowledge. I learned so much those first couple of years. My boss was very supportive and constantly looking for opportunities for me to grow. During that time, I sat back and let her help direct my professional development. She is the one who recommend my name when the SLA Chemistry Division was looking for a program planner for the 2008 Annual Conference.

As that boss moved towards retirement, I began to realize that there would be no one left to drive my professional development. In school, we are used to teachers and professors telling us what we need to do to succeed. However, in the workplace, that isn’t always the case. We need to figure it out for ourselves and take the steps that will help us have new experiences and grow. So, I started to seek out ways to drive my own success.

The SLA MN chapter drafted me as I finished my stint as a program planner to step into the four year commitment that included President of the chapter. As I begin the third year of that commitment, I look back at how much I have learned and am amazed. My confidence is much higher and I have had the opportunity to make connections all over MN and the rest of the world.

While SLA has been a huge part of my professional development, I also do many other things. I monitor numerous blogs and websites for new ideas. I try to attend online and live seminars when they are applicable and available.

While I was very lucky to have someone to direct my early career development, this is not the case for everyone. We are the only ones responsible for our professional development. We have to own it and continue owning it throughout our career. This will help us to be “Future Ready.”

Rachel Wangerin is a corporate, technical information specialist working for a global research and development company.

by Berika Williams, PR Chair 2011, IT Division/Web Services Librarian, UH-Victoria

I love this profession and I’m completely fulfilled in the work that I do. As information professionals, we adapt to emerging technologies surrounding the access to information we provide. As a result this poses fresh opportunities to organize, manage, represent, and access it.

I believe that being Future Ready is about knowing where your values lie and having goals, dreams, and pursuits that support them. I value the work that I do, time spent with family, friends, colleagues, giving back to the community, and being open to new skill sets and technologies. I am learning to say “no” to commitments, things, and even people that pull me away from my vision.

I am Future Ready at my job and beyond the office by being under the mentorship of those more experienced and absorbing as much training, knowledge, professional development (and interpersonal) skills to be truly successful as a newbie librarian. The greatest part is that this development is continuous and built on life-long learning.

We are service oriented, but we also enhance the goals and missions of organizations by providing consultation in being more efficient in information management. Many of us sit on the brink of technological developments and create new tools and systems that meet a variety of information needs. The versatility of our knowledge base provides immense value. This is why I love this profession.

Berika Williams is the web services librarian at the Victoria College/ University of Houston-Victoria Library. She is currently the PR chair for the Information Technology Division of SLA.

by Lynn Strand-Meyer, Minnesota Chapter, Advertising & Marketing Division

Spring 2007:  Graduate with MLIS.

Summer 2007: Attend 1^st SLA conference in Denver.

Fall 2007: part-time back-up consumer market research job morphs into excellent job share position with another SLA member.

Spring 2008: Morphs again into fulltime position.

Summer 2008: Attend 2^nd SLA conference in Seattle.

Summer 2008: Job morphs again back to part time.

Fall 2008: Lay-off.

Winter 2008-09: Wallow in self-pity and bemoan lack of jobs.

Winter 2008-Spring 2009: Start taking on contract research gigs.

Summer 2009: Attend 3^rd SLA conference in Washington DC.

Fall 2009-Spring 2010: Having a lot of fun working for myself.

Summer 2010: Attend 4^th SLA conference in New Orleans.

Fall 2010: Great opportunity at a big company opens for a market intelligence position. This newly created position SCREAMS for an individual with a library science background, but the big company doesn’t realize that. I sell myself. They totally buy in. Core competencies include knowledge management, organization of data, serving internal clients in a variety of positions – sales, marketing, business development.

The through line of the past almost 4 years: SLA conferences, keeping my skills, knowledge and expertise Future Ready.

Summer 2011: Attend 5^th SLA conference in Philadelphia.

Summer 2012: Attend 6^th SLA conference in Chicago (as part of the Annual Conference Advisory Council).

The Future? Bring it on!

Lynn Strand-Meyer is the immediate Past Program Development Chair of the Minnesota Chapter and Past-Chair of the Advertising & Marketing Division.