By Sue Mecklem, Oregon Chapter, Legal Division

I’m back from my first SLA conference, which was a wonderful, stimulating experience. I attended some interesting Legal Division and CI sessions, heard thought-provoking speeches by Thomas Friedman and James Kane, met some great people, and came back feeling energized about the profession.

One of the best parts of attending the conference is that I finally feel like I “get” what Future Ready is all about within the context of working as a librarian in a large law firm. I’d frankly been a bit irritated with the whole idea, in great part because law firms are typically late adopters of technology and not known as innovators. (See Eric Mankin’s article “Innovation in Practice: Why’s It’s So Hard” to learn why firms are slow adopters.)  I felt left out of the party because SLA was focusing on these wonderful technological advances and cool toys (e.g. 23 Things, the Innovation Lab) and as much fun as I had testing them out and playing with them, I couldn’t see much value for my law firm.

But…my days being immersed in all things Future Ready at the SLA conference have shown me that Future Ready is not at all about the technology. It’s not about the gadgets or cool social networking tools that we just don’t use here at the law firm. It’s not about the coolest open-source software.

What Future Ready is about is looking forward while keeping your eye on the here and now, and doing what we all do best – being ready to connect people with information, in whatever format they need at that particular moment. At law firms, being Future Ready may mean slow adoption of new technologies and introducing new ideas in a measured manner, but the underlying readiness to connect our attorneys to quality information is what’s important. Law firms are not known for innovative practices but because of recent changes in the economy, the practice of law must change because clients are demanding it.

I’ve let the ideas and information I encountered at the conference marinate since I got back from Philly and I’ve come up with a few things we law librarians can do to gently pull slow adopters into the future. The first is to become more comfortable with technology and online tools ourselves. Knowing how to search Twitter for news about a potential client, how to search LinkedIn for an executive’s current place of employment, and how to send emails and attachments that are readable on mobile devices are basic skills we all need, and will help us show the value of new tools to the decision makers.

The second thing we can do is be patient and offer to train attorneys the way they learn best. High performers often hate looking like they don’t know something and can get easily frustrated so individual training might work better than lecturing to a group of people. Other ways to reach out include creating podcasts and online guides so attorneys can refer to them when they need them.

A third important thing is to find advocates within your firm who are interested in new ways of doing things. Attorneys interested in new technology can help informally market new ideas from the library when they tell their colleagues about them. Share interesting tidbits and cool new tools with the community of those who are interested, even if they are small in number. They will pass along helpful, interesting information to their colleagues.

Being Future Ready within the context of a law firm means encouraging the use of new technology and new ways of thinking, being patient with slow adopters, and collaborating and aligning with attorneys and others who are forward thinkers. It really is as basic as connecting attorneys with information, in new ways.

Sue Mecklem is the Reference Librarian in the Portland office of law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. She’s an active member of the Oregon Chapter of SLA and serves as its secretary.

by Libby Trudell, San Francisco Bay & Silicon Valley Chapters, IT & LM Divisions

At ProQuest and Dialog, we’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to help our customers become future ready. For the last 2 years, we’ve been working to develop a new platform to enable customers meet their strategic goals.  The intuitive, powerful search capabilities were designed through thousands of user contacts to enhance the skills sets  of users ranging from students to professionals.  It has a whole suite of tools to help info pros and end users share their work collaboratively.  It’s what customers have told us they are looking for to meet information needs into  the future.

But another aspect part of future readiness is the ability to work through change.  Moving from a comfortable and known service to something new is a big adjustment for both librarians and users.   Migrating to the new platform will require that all customers  adapt to change, whether they currently use Dialog, DataStar, CSA Illumina, ProQuest Dissertations, or a ProQuest full text content collection.   We invite SLA colleagues to get a feel for what’s  on the horizon for the new ProQuest Dialog™ service and the new ProQuest platform.   We’re getting ready to embark on an exciting journey.

– Libby Trudell, on behalf of the whole ProQuest and Dialog platform development team. Read more and get reacquainted with us at http://www.dialog.com/about/.

by Helen Josephine, Silicon Valley Chapter, Science-Technology and Engineering Divisions

A report on the new “bookless engineering library” was included in “Morning Edition” on NPR in July 2010. After this report aired, library and literary blogs quickly began discussing the future and fate of libraries in the digital age—is it the wave of the future or the end of the world as we know it? We find that some of our student and faculty users prefer digital content to print, while others do not. The digital library is not the end of the book and print collections, but the beginning of something new and exciting.

After four years of planning, the new Engineering Library at Stanford University opened on August 9, 2010. The vision document for the new library, SEQ2 Library Vision: The Information Collaboratory informed not only the physical design of the new facility but the staffing, collection and service models as well. In addition to the challenge to replace the physical collection with digital content, three themes for the new library were called out in this document: high-touch human contact, mediation and subject expertise and mutability or continuous change and experimentation.
To achieve our goal of becoming a largely bookless library with access to all of the online resources required by one of the premier schools of Engineering in the world, the constant questions we asked of our vendors were—can we get it online?, can it be flexible?, can it be self-service? We anticipate that even more innovative information resources and devices will be available to us as we continue to evolve and experiment with new technologies, new services and new vendors.

One current experiment is our e-reader program, a combination of circulating e-readers and tethered e-readers (10 Kindle, 8 Sony Touch,1 Nook,1 iPad) with content selected by librarians. In addition to the content we have selected and purchased for the e-readers, we are also testing the ability to load and read content that we have licensed from e-book vendors that allow for unlimited content download. Student feedback on the project has been positive and the e-readers are always checked-out. The e-reader program is part of our mission to understand the information needs of the current and future students and to experiment with new technologies.

Our physical space is one-third the size of our former library, but the open floor plan of the new library and the foldable, stackable, moveable furniture allows multiple configurations within our 6,000 sq ft. space. Collaborative work areas for groups of 4 or more with tables pushed together, individual work at tables near the windows, as well as impromptu classroom seating for groups as large as 50 are all feasible. The technology in the library includes a 60”digital bulletin board for announcements of library events and information plus School of Engineering events and student projects, a rolling display cart housing a 60” monitor with touch capability, an information kiosk using a 23” touch screen computer for basic library information and a 3M RFID system for book self-check out and security.

When you define your library as a place for innovation and experimentation with information technology and digital content, the possible roles for librarians are limitless and the types of services offered are dynamic and ever-changing. This is a true definition of “future-ready.”

Helen Josephine is Head of the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Library (http://lib.stanford.edu/englib), part of the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center at Stanford University.  She is a past-president of the Silicon Valley chapter of SLA and has been a member of SLA since 1999. She has also been active in many regional, state and national library groups, including the Arizona Online Users Group, California Academic and Research Libraries, and ALA.