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.

 
Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, LiveJournal… Social Media is everywhere, and a lot of organizations are using it, with varying success to stay connected and interact directly with patrons. But in a world of reduced budgets, and more responsibilities being spread among fewer librarians, how can we make judicious choices regarding which services to participate in, and how to update them with the most efficiency and effectiveness?

For the Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) at Fort Leavenworth, and for many other institutions, both in the government and private sector, social media has filled that gap for us. During this last winter’s extreme weather, we were able to send messages to our subscribing patrons that we were closing earlier than scheduled, or that we would not be open the following day. We can remind patrons of library events, and pass on useful or interesting links. We’ve also developed a system to ensure that we spend the least amount of time updating, but achieve maximum impact across our social media outlets of Twitter, Facebook and Blogger.

I took over the library’s social media outreach in late 2009. An interest in the technology outside of the library made me a de facto “expert.” This is probably how many librarians become in charge of various services, and our social media campaign was no different. In coming on to the project, I first evaluated our current efforts. The blog and Facebook were updated sporadically, and often with verbatim repeats of press releases. There were multiple reasons for this; updating was cumbersome for staff members who did not use Facebook or Blogger every day, and there was little time or energy in the day for putting together interesting or original content.

This is where having an interested person, dedicated to the task helped us: assigning social media to a single individual and making it a moderately high priority makes sure that it does not become just another task that it would be nice to have done, if someone could spare the concentration or time for it. As busy as most of us are, we most often can’t spare the extra time or brainpower, unless we make it a priority, with scheduled days and times that social media can be updated. I consider the time spent replying to comments and generating new content as blocking out “meeting” time with our patrons.

I also looked at Army regulations and guidance regarding social media. In the last few years, the military has taken a great interest in the power of social media and have gone to great lengths to promote its responsible use. One of the many ideas behind this is that if we are not engaging in the conversation via social media, someone else is doing it for us.

Paying attention to the larger organization’s social media guidance is extremely important. We want to always be sure that we are representing and portraying our organization correctly, and are never releasing information that our organization does not want to have passed on.

With all of this knowledge in hand, I discussed with members of my organization what we hoped to accomplish with social media. At first, our overall goals were amorphous and vague other than a general desire to update social media regularly, do more to promote our social media presence, and to gather enough information through this to reevaluate and redirect our social media efforts periodically. Setting goals, milestones and evaluation checkpoints is just as important for social media as it is for any major project to be sure it is effective and on-task, and not wasting time or energy on something that, for whatever reason, just isn’t effective.

We also decided which social media was important to us. We cut Technorati and moved away from updating Flickr. Technorati had fallen out of use since the library had setup its account, and there were other, friendlier services. We let Flickr fall by the wayside because all of our efforts were going into uploading photos to our own digital library, and uploading them to another online service seemed like an additional time-consuming step with less return than the valuable investment of time warranted.

Our blog had already been set up on Blogger, and we saw this as important not only because of it had already been established, but because blogs afford the most flexibility with expression and the transmission of information. It can allow you to provide links, photos, videos, commentary, review, original articles and a variety of other formats with the least amount of effort. We wanted to keep our Facebook ―fan‖ page as well, in part due to being already established, but also because it took even less effort than Blogger to update. Facebook was also an outlet heavily favored by the Army.

The service we took the biggest gamble on was Twitter. While the service had been around for several years in 2009, it wasn‘t as ubiquitous as Facebook or as traditional (by New Media Standards) as a blog. Growing a Twitter following takes considerable time and effort, and can backfire, if you build it, but they do not come, to paraphrase Field of Dreams.

I started by searching for other Fort Leavenworth organizations that had Twitter accounts, such as the newspaper, the Command and General Staff College, and even Morale and Welfare. I also followed other Army Twitter accounts, including the @USArmy account, and other libraries and archives. By following them, I was able to keep up with things happening on the Fort, in the Army and in librarianship. I was also able to engage in conversations with these institutions, and forward, or  “retweet” their posts (called Tweets) to Fort Leavenworth‘s following.

Some of these institutions followed us back, or announced our existence to their followers, which helped get the word out about our presence. Whenever I posted to the blog, I also posted to Twitter and Facebook to tell followers that we had a new blog entry up, complete with a link directly to the article.

We promoted heavily inside the library with cards containing our Twitter, Facebook and Blog addresses. We also got the word out on our large information screen in the lobby, and by submitting to the post-wide announcements email. Slowly, as we continued to provide original content, announcements, reminders and links to articles or websites of interest, our following grew to a level on par with the number of social media followers of other Fort Leavenworth organizations. Several of our tweets and articles about librarianship and archives were forwarded or retweeted by our followers, which increased our exposure. One blog entry was retweeted by one of the Smithsonian Twitter accounts as well, a real treat and highlight for our library. Through consistent and quality updates, we had grown our following and made it worth our time to continue with.

I had planned to work on our social media at least two days a week, every Tuesday and Friday. However, if you post all of your links, articles and information on only two days, over the course of a few hours, and “flood” your followers with information, it can overwhelm them, or cause them to tune you out. Spreading out blog posts was easy; Blogger has a feature that allows you to change the post date and time. Changing the date to a future date meant that I did not need to actually generate a post on Wednesday for one to appear. If nothing else, it looked like we were being more attentive to our social media than we actually were. The problem, however, was Twitter and Facebook, and the amount of time it took to copy and paste a blog URL or other information into each system. Not to mention the continued issue of flooding.

After trying several “apps” both for Facebook and Twitter, which would allow you to automatically update one with a post to the other, I settled on Hootsuite to manage this. It had several advantages. The first was that it only required one central login to update both services, and I could send to both services at once. There were other advantages as well. We could allow multiple “team” members to log into the library‘s account with their own individual usernames and passwords. We could also post-date Tweets and Facebook posts. I could spend an hour or two one or two days a week generating several blog posts and a handful of posts and tweets, but they would be spread across multiple days, all without me having to log back in to continue generating the content.

This sort of streamlining saved a significant amount of time and concentration. I could dedicate myself fully to the task once or twice a week, and see the rewards every single day.

Another technique that helped to reduce the amount of time I was spending on social media updates was to engage my fellow librarians to submit interesting information or blog posts on topics in which they were relative experts directly to me to be posted, so they did not need to bother logging in to anything, or worrying about formatting and posting procedures. I, on the other hand, had one less post to write. They submitted summaries of professional conferences they went to, book reviews, even information on common reference requests or helpful research links.

This technique gave staff a tiny and concise way to help with social networking that was in no way overwhelming, and allowed them to talk about something that they found personally to be interesting or fun.

As a continued way to promote our social media presence, and to make social media easier to use, I also have taught social media classes both for librarians and for our patrons. As time passes, the statistics culled via Facebook and Blogger’s tracking systems have let us see that our following, and therefore our effectiveness had continued to grow, reinforcing for us the value of popularity in our continued outreach.

We may break out into new forms of social media over time, as services rise and fall in usage. If we find our patrons are moving away from a service like Twitter and Facebook, and are moving over to a community blogging system like LiveJournal, or Tumblr, we will find ourselves going to where the people are. NPR has found success on Tumblr, and the Library of Congress has a huge collection of images available via Flickr. For now, we will just keep trying to perfect our utilization of the services that we already have.

Tammy Garrison is a digitization librarian attached to the archives and special collections department at the Combined Arms Research Library at Fort Leavenworth, KS. She has a strong interest in using digital media to connect patrons to library services and materials and believes in the power of libraries to make a difference in the lives of patrons. Library peeves include: excessive signage, dour librarians, and filing the graphic novels in the 700s.

In her free time, she teaches freshman communications courses and writes, including a comic (with Katy Shuttleworth) in the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords anthology from Mad Norwegian Press. She lives with her husband, foster dog, and six cats in Leavenworth, Kansas.

by Michael D. McDonald, Dr. P.H.

It can be argued that libraries have their origins in the swarm behavior of individuals and groups acquiring and sharing cultural artefacts (e.g., pictographs, books) as the fundamental repositories of knowledge within a community and the broader society. Librarians have played a key role in the founding and differentiation of America at its origins. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, for example, played key roles in deepening and broadening the tradition of knowledge sharing within the early United States.

Thomas Jefferson saw public education and acquisition of knowledge as one of the key cornerstones of a free republic. As a result, he founded the University of Virginia and the Library of Congress with the sharing of his own extensive library. Ben Franklin, in holding a similar ideal for knowledge sharing, formed the first social libraries in the late 1700s in Philadelphia, which could be described as perhaps the first public libraries in the United States.

Fast forward — the United States, in the early 21st century, is a global society with its knowledge-based transactions touching billions of lives a day. Knowledge sharing is now more a phenomenon of the world wide web and social media than of static collections of books alone. As a result, library science is fusing with knowledge science, the cognitive sciences, and the sciences of complexity, which now have less to do with human/book interactions than human/information system interactions. As a result, librarians are not only influencing the interactions between individuals and the knowledge source, but also how the knowledge of populations shapes collective intelligence and its impact on individual behaviors, and collective behavior.

Like the biologist of the 21st century, who must think not only of germs, plants, and animals but also about DNA and genes, the librarian of the 21st century must also now consider memes and memeplexes — the fundamental artefacts of science and culture and how they replicate and inform behavior, social process, and social structure. In so doing, the 21st century librarian, thinking back from the ultimate impact of their craft, has enormous power in shaping the trajectory of individuals and populations influenced by the knowledge management systems librarians architect and manage. In a world of human populations rapidly exceeding the carrying capacity of their ecosystems globally leading to food insecurity, energy crisis, water crisis, social conflict, and war, the librarian’s effective shaping of knowledge management systems becomes mission critical.

Librarians in this context have enormous power in guiding the great transformation of social ecologies in the U.S. and around the world toward resilience and sustainability. In this context, the work of librarians makes a strategic difference in humanity’s epic struggle between mass collapses of populations and humanity’s abilities to thrive under rapidly changing conditions. It is no longer just the shaping of knowledge that the 21st century librarian must attend to, but the kindling of wisdom to anticipate changing conditions, collectively transforming wise decisions into unity of effort across large populations — to collaboratively shape and live within resilient and sustainable social ecologies compatible with healthy biomes; this is the power and the craft of librarians today facing the strategic challenges of their communities, the United States, and the future of our collective humanity globally.

Dr. Michael D. McDonald is director of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure Initiative and the chief architect of the U.S. Resilience System. Dr. McDonald has led several large PanFlu exercises and provided testimony to the Congressional Budget Office on key weaknesses of current U.S. pandemic flu policy. He has been an early voice for global, real-time, transparent biosurveillance systems and building infrastructures supporting situational awareness and verifiable resilience at the household, neighborhood and community levels. Dr. McDonald chaired the Genomics and Bioinformatics working group and was co-founder of the Bioterrorism working group of IEEE. Dr. McDonald does research in memetics and biosecurity in association with several universities and government agencies and has been co-principal investigator with the Centers for Disease Control on the Psychosocial Dimensions of BioSecurity Initiative. He is Principal Investigator on the Global Resilience System testbed and is currently the President and CEO of Global Health Initiatives, Inc. He is deeply involved in the prevention and management of large-scale social crises, such as through his work in Haiti, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States.

On October 20, Dr. Michael D. McDonald will engage a discourse on the social media, intelligent social networks, information sharing environments, and Resilience Systems, as some of the fundamental tools of strategically oriented librarians embracing the full power and responsibilities of the professions. You may join this in person or via simulcast.

by Risa Sacks

“Future ready” for me has always been about discovering, learning and using the best tools for finding information wherever it lives, and connecting to the ‘information holders.’

Primary Research

I specialize in “Primary Research” – finding answers that don’t already appear online. My job ranges from interviewing experts to learn the information in their heads, to digging in archives for some obscure piece of paper. While the initial search is to find what answers are available online, the next level of online search focuses on new ‘sources’ for information and how to reach them.

Some examples of being ‘future ready’ over the past few years include finding information in the many new places it lives, using new tools to reach out to the experts identified, and communicating with them in the manner they most prefer.

Finding information where it lives

We all know that long gone are the days where all we had to consider were printed materials. To identify people who might fill in the blanks, expand information found online, clarify, add levels of richness and nuance, I now need to search the blogosphere, tweets, video and audio feeds, power point presentations, discussion boards and specialty groups to name a few of the places information now ‘lives.’ An Addictomatic search (www.Addictomatic.com) brings information from Twitter, Bing News, Google Blog Search, Truveo Video Search, YouTube, Flickr, Blinkx Mainstream Vid News; Wikio, Twingly Blog Search, Yahoo Web Search, Friendfeed and Ask.com News…you get the idea.

Posting a request on specialty groups within LinkedIn, Google, etc., and discussion lists in SLA, BusLib, Association of Independent Information Professionals (aiip.org) brings help and recommendations from targeted convocations of experts – whether it’s green tech or durable medical equipment sales. And all in very real time.

Seeing a YouTube video of a Chief Medical Officer helps me evaluate that he comes across as believable, caring, conscientious and competent – just what I’d want in recommending an expert witness. Providing the video link to the law firm clients also helps their selection process.

A LinkedIn search can find me telecommunications experts from Nepal to Namibia, or coal mining maintenance personnel within 25 miles of the zip code of a specific mine in Montana.

Reaching out to experts and sources

Once I’ve identified possible experts, new tools help reach out to them. Anything that provides a point of connection, as opposed to a completely cold contact, is useful.

Though I have a number of issues with LinkedIn and it’s far from perfect, I’ll use it for several examples. Recently posting requests to LinkedIn Groups for Durable Medical Equipment and Hospital Infection Control not only identified experts, but also provided entrees – “tell him I sent you”, “I’ve been in the field for 20 years – drop me a note if I can help” and “feel free to give me a call.”

With LinkedIn, if I link to 10 people and each of them has 50 connections, I have second level connections to 500 people, and if each of those have 50 connections, all of a sudden, my universe of third level connections is 25,000 strong. I can contact them using ‘inMail’ or just mentioning that we are LinkedIn connections seems to provide a level of legitimacy to my request.

Communicating

For ongoing and in-depth communications, we can Skype, text, video conference, and webX, as well as using the trusty traditional telephone. The world is totally mobile, so talking from airports or the beach is common. With my ‘smart device’ I can snap and send a picture or video of the shack that’s the supposed ‘branch office’ of the potential merger partner, or show clients close ups of documents that I find on a distant site. 

One World……Many stories…Future Ready

While I don’t know what the future will bring, I know it will include new tools to help identify relevant people, new ways to contact them and new methods for starting and continuing meaningful communication with them. 

In today’s world, information is constantly expanding – at the same time we are more connected than ever. A fruit seller in Tunisia can spark a revolution across a region. A doctor at the Mayo clinic may help diagnose a child in a remote African region. Every day we see increased evidence of the global interconnectedness of economies and lives. Including a variety of people and viewpoints is critical for us to provide more complete answers. So as information professionals, ‘future ready’ will help us continue to increase our ‘range’ and ‘grasp’ as we keep on reaching out.

Risa Sacks is a freelance researcher who provides primary research services to companies, research departments and other researchers. She can be reached at risa@risasacks.com, or, of course, by phone at 508 852-8686.

By Christine Sellers, Legal Reference Specialist, and Andrew Weber, Legislative Information Systems Manager, Law Library of Congress

Best Practices for Government Libraries is a collaborative document that is put out annually on a specific topic of interest to government libraries and includes content submitted by government librarians and community leaders with an interest in government libraries. The 2011 edition includes over 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 60 contributors including librarians in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, and more. Best Practices is edited by Marie Kaddell, Senior Information Professional Consultant; SLA DGI Chair.  If you did not write for this year’s Best Practices, Marie invites you to submit a guest post for the Government Info Pro marie.kaddell@lexisnexis.com.

The Law Library of Congress continues to embrace new mediums to spread and promote our collections, research and services. Over the last two years we have started using social media in a variety of ways. The Law Library has been on Twitter since October 2009 and Facebook since December 2009. The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), a multi-national consortium we oversee, is also on Facebook. We started our newest Twitter feed in April 2011: @THOMASdotgov, which is designed to give timely updates regarding legislation from THOMAS.

Our goal in social media is to develop and expand knowledge about the Law Library of Congress. In furtherance of that, we determined that a blog would fill a role that the other social media efforts did not. It would provide a platform for more discussion or analysis than a tweet or post to Facebook could provide, but not be as in depth as the detailed reports that we make available on our website.

Communications Plan
One of our aims was to expose the various facets of the Law Library that might not necessarily be well-known, but could be very useful to our diverse clientele. To that end, we started with a group of bloggers that included staff from across our organization including a librarian from collection services, our New Zealand foreign law specialist, our United Kingdom foreign law specialist, and the two of us. Andrew would focus on posts related to THOMAS and Christine would provide more of a legal reference librarian viewpoint. We hoped this cross-section of staff would provide those outside of the Law Library with a glimpse into the different kinds of work that we do here, as well as the people doing that work.

We wanted to post daily to the blog, with a stated goal of 5-8 posts per week. Each author‘s goal was to contribute one or two posts a week so there would be regular content on a variety of subjects. Coming up with a name for the blog took time as we wanted something catchy and unique to the Law Library, but also with gravity befitting the institution for which we would be writing. We also needed something everyone agreed upon and could understand! We finally decided upon In Custodia Legis, which is Latin for in the custody of the law. We tried to put our spin on the legal phrase because one role of the Law Library of Congress is to be a custodian of law and legislation.

In Custodia Legis was officially launched on August 2, 2010, with our post What is In Custodia Legis?. We have been keeping up a strong and steady clip since then! By the end of April we had published our 200th post in just our ninth month.

Process

Each of our posts goes through a thorough review process before being published. Only the five primary authors have access to the WordPress software. After the review process, the author has final approval and publishes the post. The process is flexible and posts can be drafted, reviewed, and posted on the same day. Each week we email out a status update with the proposed posts for the week and their step in the review process. This helps ensure content is posted every day of the week and provides reminders for specific event themed posts.

Content

August 2010 was a great first month for us! We had ideas built up since we first decided to start a blog back in November 2009. But after the first month with twenty wonderful posts, we realized coming up with posts on a daily basis took some time (sadly only 14 in September). One thing we did was reach out to other Law Library employees for potential guest posts. We were so successful with submissions that we created a new category for them. As the blog became more established, some staff members came to us with post ideas.

We also developed regular weekly content, which included interviews with Law Library staff and a Pic of the Week feature every Friday. The picture provided a fun way to end the week, while still occasionally linking to previous posts. The pictures also provide a creative outlet for looking at things you pass by every day (sometimes for years) with a fresh perspective. One of our favorites was the introductory picture of a card catalog sign in the Law Library Reading Room. One of our most viewed is Looking Up the Old Law Library, which is a view of where the Law Library used to be thirty years ago in the Jefferson Building.

Through the six questions in the interviews, we‘ve learned a wealth of knowledge about our co-workers and the institution. Two questions in particular bring out interesting answers: ―What is the most interesting fact you‘ve learned about the Law Library? and ―What is something most of your co-workers do not know about you? Interviewees tell us those are the hardest questions to answer. For the former question, answers ranged from learning that more than half of the Law Library‘s print collection is in languages other than English to applauding the outstanding intellectual quality of the staff at the Law Library. For the later question highlights include a co-worker who was offered a job driving a Zamboni and one who interviewed President George W. Bush.

Both series were designed to provide an insider‘s perspective of the Law Library. A goal is to provide our audience with faces behind the institution.

Lessons Learned
We have learned a number of things since starting the blog, which we thought we should share with you. One of the more difficult lessons was finding the right tone and was a varied learning process for each blogger. As we are writing for the Law Library, the tone of posts cannot be too personal. Yet that personality is what makes blogs different and enjoyable. We have sought and continue to seek to strike the right balance in our writing.

We have also learned that having steady and continuous content takes a lot of planning. We have posts planned for up to two weeks in advance. Andrew sends out status updates containing the post schedule so that all of those involved in the blogging process can be aware of what needs to be done and where posts are in the review process. It takes time to be this organized, but we think the consistency in the blog proves that it is worth it. It also takes time to solicit content from guest bloggers and interviewees, which we try to work into the schedule as much as possible.

We have been surprised by which posts do well and which do not. We have also been surprised by the fact that we can never accurately predict which category a post will fall into ahead of time. Our interviews and pictures typically do well. We started a monthly retrospective post to provide an overview of what people view the most, liked on our Facebook page, commented on, and tweeted about.

Themed day posts have been popular with one on St. Patrick‘s Day and Cinco de Mayo in our all time top five. Blogging about updates to THOMAS.gov also received a lot of page views. Our most viewed post since we started is a straightforward post sharing our statistics, Top Law Library of Congress Web Pages. Our worst post was one of the first of the retrospective posts, December Retrospective. We have since rebranded how we announce the posts, which has improved their statistics.

Above all, we have really enjoyed how much fun writing for the blog can be and hearing how much people enjoy reading it. Some of Christine‘s favorite posts are those that detail reference questions received either on the reference desk or through the Library‘s Ask A Librarian service. These posts include Tales of Al Capone‘s Jury and What Does This Symbol Mean?. Andrew enjoys writing on topics that relate to THOMAS like Where to Watch Congress Online and THOMAS off of THOMAS.

We hope you will stop by to read our blog sometime and leave a comment!

Christine Sellers joined the Law Library of Congress as a Legal Reference Librarian in September 2009. In addition to her reference duties in the Law Library Reading Room, she is part of a team that develops new features for THOMAS and has compiled a report on the social media practices of Congress. Previously, she created the Law Librarians of Leisure blog and before that was a Senior Research Librarian at Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd, P.A. in South Carolina. Sellers holds a Bachelor’s degree in art history and English from Wellesley College, as well as a Juris Doctor and a Masters of Library and Information Science from the University of South Carolina.

Andrew Weber, Legislative Information Systems Manager, has been at the Law Library of Congress since June 2004. He has contributed to reports for Congress, updated parts of The Bluebook, trademarked the GLIN logo, and drafted visa applications for co-workers. He runs the Law Library’s Twitter account and Facebook page and works to develop and implement new features for THOMAS. He has been fortunate to blend his love of technology, law, gadgets, and working for Congress into his ideal position. Weber holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Ball State University and a Juris Doctor and a Master’s in Public and International Affairs from 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.

Today we, Future Ready 365 and On Firmer Ground, are posting the same piece to demonstrate the collaboration we both highly value. Both blogs strive to share proactive solutions and innovative ideas to illustrate how to keep information professionals vital, ready for the future and on firmer ground.

by Joan Thomas, Heart of America Chapter, Legal Division

Newsletters are an effective tool to communicate information to users while promoting the library’s value. How do you make a newsletter Future Ready? At Bryan Cave LLP, the library staff struggled to consistently produce office specific newsletters. It became increasingly more difficult to find the time and enthusiasm to create content for subsequent issues. We needed a streamlined collaboration that evenly distributed the work between several offices. We needed to connect with attorneys and staff at offices with no library staff presence. We also wanted to drive users to the library’s page on eCave2, the firm’s Intranet. Our challenge was to determine how we could join forces to collaborate on a firmwide e-newsletter to highlight new subscriptions and interesting legal news.

In early 2010, we formed a committee to organize the work flow, design the template, and determine how to connect the newsletter to the library’s page. We wanted news blurbs that were short bursts of information. We decided to publish the newsletter every 3 weeks. Each reference librarian and library manager is responsible for contributing articles on a rotating basis. The team for each issue consists of three librarians. One of the three librarians serves as the editor. We posted a schedule to eCave2. The schedule ensures that we share responsibility.

Committee members worked with Creative Services to design the template. We wanted the newsletter to look modern and to reflect the firm’s design aesthetic. We wanted the contents inside the body of the email (no more attached PDFs). Our library’s logo is included. The library staff voted to determine the favorite, which we continue to use today.

Finally, how should we connect the newsletter to the library’s page? A Future Ready newsletter should be connected to the library’s online presence. The firm’s Intranet operates on SharePoint. As the library staff experimented with SharePoint in 2009, they started adding news posts to a section of the library’s page which is very similar to an internal blog. This seemed like a natural place to post the articles. During each three week period, the designated authors create content to post to the blog which we named L&RS News. The editor then selects 4-6 articles to include in the newsletter which is distributed to the entire firm. The newsletter includes links back to L&RS News on the library’s page. We named the newsletter in the KNOW which is a natural extension of our Just Say KNOW branding.

Measuring success is an ongoing endeavor. We continue to receive positive comments which sometimes include reference requests. The newsletter increased the library’s profile in offices with no library presence. The library is doing a solid job broadcasting information to our users. Our next Future Ready task is to shift from broadcasting information to initiating conversations with users. What can we do besides face to face communication? We are exploring how to use social media tools to engage with attorneys and staff.

Joan serves as the Manager of Library and Research Services for Bryan Cave LLP’s Kansas City office. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Kansas and a Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Missouri.  She can be found on twitter (@msjoanthomas).

by Jamal Cromity, North Carolina Chapter, Information Technology and Leadership & Management Divisions

Being future ready will enable you to adapt to using tools that improve communication and help you develop new work flow paths. When using social media, the path to making successful community connection is not always certain. While you may have a desire to use one or two networking tools consistently, you will hear about another tool that sparks your interest which can also cause feelings associated with “information overload.” With so much information available from a number of directions, it becomes difficult to discern and synthesize people and services.

….Step back, take a deep breath, and be more determined to move forward. Follow these steps:

• Continue to you use the one or two services that work for you
• Through status updates or blog posts, schedule time to post either daily or weekly
• Read and reply to others you follow or are connected with

Your community connections will grow over time.

Here is a tip…

For personal or as an enterprise competitive intelligence site, those using tools such as Facebook and Twitter can consider converting these micro blogs into a newspaper format using Paper.li to help improve the way you discern, synthesize, and share information from the community connections you make.

In the image on the right is a paper I created called, “The Co-Lab Tribune” to help review post sent via links by those I follow.

Jamal Cromity has worked in the information industry for over 15 years. He is currently a UX Specialist for ProQuest Dialog and is Associate Editor for the New Review of Information Networking. Jamal holds an MLS from NCCU , an MBA from NYIT and is PM (Project Management) certified. He has received awards and honors from many associations including ALA, SLA, NCSLA, and NCLA.

by Michelle Manafy

There is certainly a sense that “kids today” read less and that they have short attention spans. However, technology has actually triggered an explosion of media usage among young people in the last five years – so much so that young people spend about 7 1/2 hours a day consuming media, according to a study of 8- to 18-year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And, while Kaiser reports that print is the only category of media consumption to lose ground among young people, within the print category only newspapers and magazines declined. Book reading held steady over the previous five years and even increased by a few minutes a day over the last decade. (Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds).

Yet despite their content consumption, young people today can be baffling when it comes to understanding how to engage them in your content products and services as they are also notoriously brand-fickle and their attention — while not at all limited in its span — is fractured among multiple delivery devices (often at the same time).

In my work on the book Dancing With Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation That’s Transforming the Way Business Is Done (May 2011, CyberageBooks, http://bit.ly/DwDNsite), I came across many valuable resources for ways in which to rethink customer (reader) engagement in light of this generation. One of these is the NAA Foundation (http://www.naafoundation.org), which publishes a great deal of research on the topic of engaging younger readers, replete with examples of engagement strategies being tested by educators and publishers, much of which can be applied outside the newspaper industry.

With regards to the native’s multi-platform tendencies, the NAA suggests that we stop scoffing at multitasking and make it work for us instead. They ask, “Have you ever thought about what kinds of products you might provide that would work well with the other things young people do?” In the information industry, we certainly see an increase of products that integrate information into workflow on a variety of platforms. However when we look to the future, at the digital native, integration will have to go beyond workflow, and integrate the consumer into all aspects of content consumption, distribution, and even creation.

We all see an increase of social sharing mechanisms on consumer and professional information products, and even on public library sites. However, these tactics are only a start. The NAA “Youth Media DNA” report states that, “respondents were more likely to recall reading school newspapers prepared by their peers … rather than newspaper youth content prepared for them.” In fact, UK research firm Capgemini found that for an increasing number of young users, content gets added value from the ability to discuss it collectively (http://bit.ly/e93AJr). These online community dynamics alter traditional patterns of trust: consumers, especially the younger generation, have more confidence in peer-generated or crowdsourced content. So while previous generations might have been loyal to trusted info-brands, younger consumers trust their social lens to focus them on worthwhile information.

When we look forward to creating products and services that will engage our next generation of content consumers, we need to be aware that their different content consumption habits are not a death knell. Rather, if we understand their desire to consume content on their own terms, on a variety of platforms, actively engage with it in a socially mediated way — and even participate in its creation — we can chart a path to engagement that will resonate with this generation of content consumers.

Michelle Manafy is director of content for UK based digital publisher, Free Pint, Limited (www.freepint.com), which provides publications and resources that meet the needs of information professionals. An award-winning writer and editor, Michelle’s focus is on emerging trends in digital content and how they shape successful business practices. She is also the co-editor of and a contributor to the new book Dancing With Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation that is Transforming the Way Business is Done (http://bit.ly/DwDNsite).

by Graeme Byrd

Reposted by permission from FMYI (www.fmyi.com/blog/single/we_are_information_sherpas)

We definitely are in the information age. People are sending 1,200 tweets per second (tps) and spending 800 million minutes a month on Facebook posting 900 million objects. Wow. What do we do with all of this information that is constantly being thrown our way?

With all this information being shared in a digital fashion, even Seth Godin has posed the question about The future of the library.

Godin believes that if one wants to watch a movie, “Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library…” Yes, the structure of a library is changing, but it continues to be essential to education, to future generations. Netflix may have a “library” of films, but is missing the human energy. “The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library.” Wrote Godin, “A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher.” Librarians – information professionals – are more critical to knowledge sharing than ever before because of the increased amount of information being shared.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of presenting to and spending a day with the Southern California Chapter of the Special Libraries Association, an international organization of information professionals, discussing knowledge management and the relationships people have to information.

An exciting day of 5 speakers discussing tools for information sharing, building relationships with vendors and best practices for knowledge professionals, followed by an afternoon of unconference sessions full of engaged professionals.

• Britt Foster, a gradating MLIS student and blogger with a passion for public libraries shared social media tools to help engagement.
• Sandra Crumlish with the St. Jude Medical provided examples of how working closely with vendors and building a partnership provides for better adoption of services.
• Scott Brown with Social Information Group and Christy Confetti Higgins, Oracle’s Cybrarian shared examples of Oracle’s internal virtual library and how one person has built relationships in an international company to engage their team and share knowledge management tools.

The theme throughout the day was that as a member of a small team of information professionals in an organization (often, a team of one) build relationships with other stakeholders. Libraries are powered by human energy (like FMYI) – sherpas of knowledge.

These special guides are trusted more by colleagues because they provide relevant tools and resources. Information junkies can be change agents empowering teams to make a difference.

While librarians are “information professionals” you also are a knowledge expert in your organization. Are you ready to be a change agent?

We are surrounded by Change agents who are empowering teams to make a difference. Ian Symmonds is helping revolutionize the future of education by advising schools around emerging trends. Kevin Carroll is changing the world with a red ball and helping create a positive atmosphere for youth through sport. And Cindy Romaine (the SLA President) is leading SLA to be Future Ready in an ever-changing world. We all have knowledge. We all can empower others to make a difference. We all can be change agents.

As leaders in knowledge management we are uniting as change agents as the future of information is rapidly changing. Are you ready today to be an information sherpa for your organization? Be Future Ready.

Keep empowering.

Graeme Byrd is the Business Development & Collaboration Manager of FMYI [for my innovation], a collaboration software company, headquartered in Portland, OR, committed to positively affecting society through sustainability and technology. Thousands of companies, nonprofits, government agencies and universities use FMYI to communicate and collaborate. Committed to building a better future and engaging his generation in sustainability, Graeme is the Chapter Leader for the Portland Professional Chapter of Net Impact and serves on Oregon Environmental Council’s Emerging Leaders Board. Graeme has been a speaker at Net Impact, Sustainable Business Oregon and Special Libraries Association events helping others become change agents.

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.