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 Donna Slaton, Kentucky & Tennessee Valley Chapters, Solo Librarians Division

Selection is the librarian’s most valuable tool for the future. Selection is not censorship. Librarians of the future should select for value and purpose with clearly defined goals in mind. When the whole world can “Google” anything in print pretty much, what will set libraries apart is the professional arrangement of valuable and useful materials, not the inclusion of vulgar, pornagraphic or trendy material just to say they are not censoring anything. It is time to “control” your stuff and choose wisely, not catalog anything and everything but choose selectively so that libraries are a respected resource not a less than “Google” sized collection of anything and everything.

Selection policies need to be reviewed often in this changing world not to reflect the largest possibilities for gathering in but the most specific scope for the library and its population to be served. Public and academic libraries more than special libraries have continuously grown beyond reason because they have in the last two decades tried to collect everything. But even special libraries that have a more narrow focus have been growing with the attitude that bigger is better to the point where storage and staff expense is not in line with value given to anyone except other librarians.

Weeding is also a necessary tool of selection. Once you have selected it, you have to recognize if it is not in use, or has never been used, you should move it out to provide space for necessary materials. Too many librarians still horde old stuff because they cannot bear to throw away a book. There is simply too much stuff in print for anyone to ever read and too many copies of most of it.

With the advent of OCLC network and Inter Library Loan accessibility, budgets for that continuously grew as well. When I graduated college in the mid 70s, ILL was for serious scholarly research – not for the public, private or special libraries to loan each other at growing mail expenses( which is more than the cost of a paperback), either the second oldest James Patterson novel, or an obscure author that is only held by three libraries, because his second cousin in another state just decided he wanted to read it.

We have promoted libraries as the respository of everything without focusing on needs instead of wants. Libraries cannot out google Google. We do not accept paid advertising. The sooner we realize that and specialize in what we do best as the original search engine the more ready for the future we will be with valuable materials and useful information, not just a room full of stuff.

With sharply focused collections, bibliographies of materials, and links specifically addressing our unique clientele’s needs, special librarians have an opportunity to lead the way in guiding users to the needed materials without gathering all of it ourselves. Future ready is smaller and smarter.

Donna F. Slaton is Librarian II for the Green River Correctional Complex – a medium security prison in Kentucky’s Dept of Corrections. She served 10 years as Associate Director of the Hopkins County-Madisonville Public Library and switched from public to special libraries in 2008, joining SLA in 2009. She writes a weekly column for the Madisonville Messenger newspaper and blogs under LibraryUp and LibraryLadyWrites and is Past President of the Kentucky Storytelling Association. Her web site is www.misspockets3.com.

by James Kane

In 1930, a paper cup salesman for the Lilly Tulip Cup Company walked into a Walgreen’s Drug Store near 43rd St. and Bowen Ave. in Chicago, IL and changed the world.

That’s a pretty dramatic statement, but it’s true. You see, paper cups were big business in the early part of the 20th century. As scientists and public heath officials warned people about the dangers of drinking from unwashed glassware and shared eating utensils, disposable food and beverage products became all the rage. And, of course, where there is a rage, there is a salesman.

One prime target of these paper cup peddlers were drug stores. After prohibition became law in 1919, the introduction of the soda fountain in American drug stores not only filled the social void caused by the closing of bars and speakeasies, but ushered in the dawn of the soft drink. Egg cremes, Black Cows, and Cherry Phosphates became staples of the new American diet, and the glasses they were served in the target of every paper cup salesman in the country.

All except one.

While most cup vendors made the obvious pitch to the drug store owners and soda fountain managers – no more broken glasses, no more dishwashing, no more risk of spreading disease – our salesman had a different take.  When he first walked into the Walgreen’s off 43rd Street, he knew that he couldn’t make a sale using the same tired  arguments that others had made before him. So, instead of trying to sell the products he brought with him that day, he stood in the back of the room and watched.  More importantly, he learned.

It was just before noon when the store began to fill up with day’s lunch crowd.  He watched as the first ten patrons arrived and took up all the seats at the fountain’s counter. And then watched as one by one the people from the streets entered the store, looked around for a vacant seat, and walked out the door, having never bought a thing. It was all that watching that made everything clear.  He knew what Walgreen’s problem was, and it wasn’t paper cups.

The problem Walgreen’s had was the same problem every soda fountain of its day had.  Not enough space. Everyone wanted a seat, but those who got there first didn’t want to leave.  Without the turnover, the stores were losing sales – and lots of them! Our salesman knew by observing one potential customer after another walk out the door without being served that the answer was not cups, it was lids. He explained to the Walgreen’s manager how he would increase the soda fountain’s sales tenfold without adding even one foot of new counter space. Yes, he would provide them with paper cups, but every one of those cups would come with a lid, and the concept of “take out” was born.

This is a story about the power of insight and the importance of stepping back to see what the real problem is.  We all have our bag of goods – the things we try to sell to others every day. We come ready to explain our value and convince the non-believers of our importance, only to be left dumbfounded that they just don’t get it. The tried and true paper cup pitch is “we can SAVE you money.” The insightful one is “we can MAKE you money.”

We all fall into the trap of trying to sell what we have instead of selling what others need. The first requires doing nothing more than what you have always done, the second demands that you step back and understand what the real problem is. Being “future ready” is not only about knowing how to go forward, it’s about knowing when to step back. Knowing how to put yourself in the shoes of others and figuring out what they truly need and want.  What your boss needs.  What your institution and organization needs.  What your client and customer needs.  What your industry needs.  Sometimes you may have the solution in your bag.  Sometimes you will need to order lids.

Insight is not a magical gift we are born with. It is something we develop – by listening, by watching, by learning, and by practicing empathy. It takes some time to get good at it, but the results are definitely worth the effort.  They certainly were for our paper cup salesman. He made the sale to Walgreens, but practicing insight would bring him even  greater rewards. Standing in the back of the room and watching what was really going on gave birth to the take-out business, and forever changed the course of Ray Kroc’s life. Applying what he learned at the Walgreen’s drug store in 1930 would influence his decision to buy a small restaurant in San Bernadino, California 20 years later from brothers Dick and Mac McDonald. The rest, as they say, is history.

Merging the worlds of business, neuroscience, and behavioral psychology, James Kane is one of the leading researchers and consultants in the science of loyalty and the role it plays in human relationships and the communities we form.Kane makes the case that loyalty is a complex human emotion and a fundamental part of our human nature. When an organization or individual demonstrates those loyalty-building behaviors, they can develop relationships that will last a lifetime and result in unwavering and unlimited support.

SLA has retained the services of James Kane for a 12-month pilot program where he will audit and assess one Chapter’s current relationships, consult with and train Chapter leadership, and develop and implement loyalty strategies that will have broad applicability to other SLA units. He is the closing keynote presentation at the SLA Annual Conference in Philadelphia.  For more information see JamesKane.com

by Joe Grobelny

We must wrestle with truth because:

Even if we admit that not all information-seeking behavior is directed at determining the truth, we have to admit that a large percentage of it is. And, if librarians are to develop policies about how to organize information, develop procedures for handling morally difficult reference requests, instruct others in appropriate evaluative techniques, or any other of our duties, then we need to understand this thing called ‘information’ and how it relates to ‘knowledge’. Given that truth is integral to knowledge (and perhaps to information, too) it follows that truth is a professional concern.

-Lane Wilkinson, Sense and Reference

We are engaging in information literacy and have to be clear about what truth, to us, actually is, because:

Baudrillard’s pataphysical projections of his own fantastic universe of runaway signs encourage academics to embrace ludic forms of postmodernism for the radical posture it affords them as a cover for their role as passive supplicants of history and to avoid the concrete politics that Freire speaks about.

-Peter McLaren and Tomaz Tadeu da Silva, Decentering Pedagogy: Critical Literacy, resistance, and the politics of memory,p.85 in Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter (1993)

Making truth an integral part of our instruction is a first-order priority. If we say we are teaching patrons and students to be “information literate,” which is to be able to navigate the multitude of voices around them and use information and knowledge to create their own voice, then we cannot shy away from truth, and especially not the social, political, and economic problems that surround the systems of information management and the creation of knowledge. We need to refine our voices, and understand how we play into those problems as well. I’m looking at you, librarians.

Joe Grobelny is a reference librarian at the Jerry Crail Johnson Earth Sciences and Map Library at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He blogs regularly at http://birdswithteeth.wordpress.com/

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.

by Christine Carmichael, Nebraska Chapter, Knowledge Management Division

“Bragging isn’t becoming.”

“If you’re good (or great) at what you do, you don’t need to brag.”

I beg to differ! In an era where competition is fierce, we have to toot our own horns. We need to differentiate our skill sets and focus attention on our greatest strengths. Here is how two of my strengths work for me.

Every professor, every student I meet absolutely MUST know what I can do for them. Then I make them WANT me to prove it. I have connections with people because I’ve made it my business to know what they are passionate about. Then I keep an eye out for related things. A well-timed email or phone call with a link relevant to them keeps ME on the radar.

But, making connections isn’t just about building your network. In my daily work, making connections between disparate pieces of information (and sometimes disparate people) is often where I have the greatest successes. This is where serendipity comes into play:

A pair of Marketing students came to me (requested by their professor) for help finding information on golf drivers. Talk about specific! General industry information was fairly easy, but driver rankings were proving to be a challenge. A database search of “ranking” and “driver”, while broad (think NASCAR, not PGA) netted an article in Cigar Aficionado. The students were awestruck! It was exactly what they had been looking for, but they were willing to overlook it because it wasn’t in a place they were expecting.

From Golf to Cigars

I was able to make them see a connection – one they weren’t looking for – between GOLF and CIGARS. (What else does one smoke at the 19th hole?) The students departed repeating one of my mantras: “You never know where a good piece of information will turn up.”

I suppose you could define serendipity as “just waiting for happy accidents.” In 2004, University of Georgia’s Elizabeth B. Cooksey said it was “one’s discovery of something new combined with the realization of a connection between it and something one already knew…” For me (and I have to think for many info pros) serendipitous findings are things I count on in my research process. They are “a-ha moments” writ large.

Am I Future ready? Serendipitously so.

Christine Carmichael is President of the Nebraska Chapter of SLA and Communications Director the Knowledge Management Chapter.

by Liz Wallach, Washington, DC Chapter, Environment & Resource Management Division

As we work to demonstrate our value to our organizations, we may be asked to participate in projects with other groups or divisions. Being asked to contribute to a project is an opportunity to showcase our skills and knowledge as information professionals. Here is a new project management concept that I recently learned about.

Agile Project Management gives a flexible framework for completing a project with an iterative approach. Agile is not new (only new to me) and it is not something that you learn quickly. There is a whole industry devoted to training seminars, consulting, and software tools. I had never heard about the Agile concept before attending a 3 day “boot camp” seminar last summer. I realized very quickly that I had a lot to learn.

The main advantage of using an Agile approach is that it allows you to make changes to your concepts as you move through the process. Agile participants accept that there is no way for you to know exactly what the end product will look like – no matter how many requirements you write. Ideas should evolve as you gather more information. So Agile allows you to refine and revise your concept as you learn more about the possibilities. These few sentences are just scratching the surface of how the Agile method works.

There are 2 reasons that I connect this with our FutureReady blog:

1. It’s healthy to be challenged by learning about something with which you have no experience.
2. I am building new relationships with other groups within my company by working on these projects.

I am an SLA member who has always worked in a “nontraditional” library position, but I have strongly associated myself with the information professionals in SLA. As we move into the future, we should remember to challenge ourselves by learning about new ideas to keep our profession “agile”.

Liz Wallach has worked at BNA for 22 years in various research positions, most recently as a Manager of Special Projects. She has been a member of SLA for almost that long, since completing her M.S.L.S. at Catholic University.

by Ned Potter, Europe Chapter, Leadership & Management Division
by Laura Woods, Europe Chapter, Leadership & Management and Legal Divisions

Libraries and information professionals are stuck in a bit of an echo chamber. We spend way too much time talking to one another, and not nearly enough time talking to the potential users. Potential users who have no idea really what a (future ready) library does, but who would probably come and visit if they did. Some people use an analogy of ‘floating voters’ to describe those currently indifferent to libraries, but I think our offer has changed so much and people’s perceptions of libraries are so far behind, these are people who don’t even realise there’s an election on…

Classic examples of our preaching to the converted often come when the profession or the industry is criticised from outside. When Seth Godin or someone from the national press puts us down, our first urge seems to be to find another librarian to commiserate with. This doesn’t do anything, not really – it’s great to engage the library community by blogging about it, but library blogs tend to be read by other librarians –  we also need to engage the people who heard all the bad stuff about libraries in the first place. We need to fight back in public. In short, we need to take greater control of the narrative arc concerning libraries, and stop letting other people write our story for us.

The presentation below is one used by myself and Laura Woods when we talk about the echo chamber – follow the Prezi through to find out more about the concept, about how it impacts negatively on libraries, and to see some ideas for marketing libraries outside of the echo chamber in future.

Ned Potter works in the field of digitisation at an academic library in the UK; he was named as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker for 2011, and is about to attend the SLA Annual Conference in Philly as a winner of the SLA-Europe Early Career Conference Award. His blog and other presentations can be found at www.thewikiman.org.
Laura Woods is the current Webmaster and Bulletin Editor for the Europe Chapter. Her blog, Organising Chaos can be read at http://woodsiegirl.wordpress.com/.

by Dr. Craig Fleisher, Dean, School of Business and Public Affairs, College of Coastal Georgia, USA

The future for business planners, knowledge managers, and special librarians will require enhanced sense-making ability.  In the past, finding and organizing information was the key to competitive success. Those organizations who found it first had advantages that they could often leverage in the marketplace.  Today, most individuals and organizations have excellent access to data and information; in reality, my research has shown that most organizations have too much of both, and too little of an idea for what to do with it.

Making things worse, much of the collected data and information resides in storage (i.e., data warehouses, networks, spreadsheets, etc.) where it gets stale quickly and cannot serve any viable competitive use. Like milk, information spoils if it isn’t treated and utilized. The half-life of time for acting on competitive information continues to shrink in this day and age and isn’t likely to lengthen anytime soon.

Future ready means that analysts in companies will need to work on the front-end with their data acquisition and information management/knowledge professional colleagues, making sure that what is collected provides the missing pieces to the puzzles that analysts and planners know they need to put together to support decisions. The need to make decisions drives our analysis. Our analysis needs drives our data collection. The rule for future success: Don’t collect data or information for which we do not already have analytic mechanisms in place to use it within. Why buy and store milk if you are not going to drink it?

Dr. Craig Fleisher is a former President of the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals, author of several foundational books in CI and analysis, and was awarded its Meritorious recognition for lifetime contributions to the field.

by Kyle Naff, Wisconsin Chapter, Business & Finance Division

I’ve never been one to put much thought into themes. I understand the point of them, uniting presumably unrelated concepts into one cohesive statement or catchphrase. Yet, sometimes they just seem to stretch a little bit too much. The same could be said about our association’s themes. As an academic librarian, I have often thought that all of the corporate jargon employed in the Alignment Project didn’t apply to my situation, and I know that I wasn’t alone.

However, this year has been different, as President Romaine has directly challenged all of us to take our profession into the next stage of its evolutionary process. As I listened to her remarks on ‘Future Ready’ at the Leadership Summit, she described the past role of the information professional, as curator, guarding the materials in the physical space. This has obviously given way to the information explosion that has occurred, like a fire hydrant being emptied into the street for the masses. The role of the information professional, regardless of setting, is to stand in front of the fire hydrant to ‘save’ the rest from the brunt of the information overload.

That’s when I had the light bulb moment – our role as ‘future ready’ academics is something that we’ve been doing for quite a while: information literacy. Our job of arming students, the future leaders of our society, with the searching and evaluation tools, allows them take on the fire hydrants of information that they’ll encounter in their own careers. [Of course, one would hope that they will know about the information professionals in their organization should they need that safety net.]

Being ‘future ready’ to me means isn’t actually about me. It’s ensuring that I instill the value of credibility, reliability and critical thinking in my students. I would hope that other academic librarians would agree.

Kyle Naff is the Business Reference & Instruction Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has been involved with SLA since Day 4 of library school and is currently President of the Wisconsin Chapter and Webmaster of the Business & Finance Division. He can be reached at kyle.sla@gmail.com.