by Nettie Seaberry, New York Chapter, Leadership & Management, Solo Librarians Divisions

Several years ago, I had an idea that would have put my organization at the forefront of providing a service that our constituents would have wholeheartedly embraced. The research was done, interested parties queried, price structures developed and legal counsel consulted, but no matter how many times I sent emails or called staff meetings to discuss the concept, I couldn’t seem to move the needle. It was apparent that the timing just wasn’t right. Retirement and leadership changes were cause for this revenue generating idea to be placed on the back burner. It slowly simmered but I never let the flame die.

Fast forward, new leadership, new ideas for moving the organization into the future were beginning to unfold. The organization’s past has been recognized as the cornerstone in the industry, but new leadership wants to chart a new direction. The time was right to reposition the idea. I used this shift to reintroduce the project and it was enthusiastically embraced. The green light has been given and it will be launched in 2011. As we work through a strategic plan for the organization under the management, I have several ideas on tap that I envision will bring more value to the information center and benefit the organization.

If you have the good fortune of staying the course within your organization you’ll have the opportunity to show your value time and time again, but you have to put yourself out there. You can’t sit in a corner, you can’t hide your talents and creativity, you have to make your moves when the time is right, stay focused and position yourself and your services to show that you’re ready, willing and able to be future ready.

Nettie Seaberry is the Director of the Minority Business Information Center at the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) in New York City. As a solo librarian she is responsible for development, implementation and administration of the Information Center, which includes establishing policies, collection development and management, research, staff supervision, information technology management, Webmaster and Volunteer Coordinator for NMSDC’s annual conferences. She currently serves as a Director on the Board of SLA.

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 Dale Stanley

Seth Godin recently blogged on the topic of “Reject the Tyranny of Being Picked” http://bit.ly/fGzcCW. I cannot think of a more pertinent and helpful concept in making ourselves “Future Ready.” We have grown up waiting to be “picked.” Whether it is for teams on the playground, for “Mr. Right,” to be recognized for our great service/profession, for the next promotion, or for some wonderful employer to somehow find our resume on LinkedIn. The best advice I can imagine is to stop waiting to be picked. And DO something.  Any little next action is sufficient as a start. The best career move I ever made is when I took a half- day, figured out why I was bored, and then decided what just one next physical action to do about it. When you become proactive, you begin the journey of making your own future.  This, of course, is the best way to be “future ready.” If you want to learn more about being proactive and having goals, read Stephen Covey http://bit.ly/6N9pR7. If you want to begin to realize the power of “next actions,” read David Allen http://www.davidco.com/. But the main thing is to stop waiting. And, as Seth puts it, “Pick yourself.”

Dale Stanley is the Director of Literature Resources at Gilead Sciences, an occasional consultant with SMR International, and has been co-instructor with Guy St.Clair and Cindy Hill in SLA’s Click University certificate programs in Knowledge Management and Knowledge Services.  He has many years of industry experience leading information groups in the medical device, industrial/office products, and pharmaceutical industries.

by Cindy Hill , Multiple Chapters and Divisions

Some of my best memories of elementary school are of playground time, before, during and after class. My friends and I would race to the jungle gym, running to our favorite spot, the parallel bar, where we would spend wonderful hours (at least it felt like hours) hanging from bent knees and then start spinning around and around. When we found the just perfect moment, we would let go, flying up into the air and then landing as far away as momentum and our bodies would take us. While I’m pretty sure we knew we could get hurt (we landed on tan bark, not rubber mats) we also were fearless, physically agile and willing to take risks.

One aspect of being Future Ready is to take that youthful fearlessness and incorporate it into our work environment, especially when we are considering starting something new or changing an existing service. Too often it’s difficult to start something new for many reasons. Often there’s the fear of failure, lack of resources, concern about being able to provide the service to everyone, or not enough funding. Considering a new service or providing a new resource, but not sure how it will be received? One way to test its viability is to launch it as a pilot using the 3Ss + 1S more model, rather than a full-scale entity. You won’t find this model in any management or text book as a former executive VP at Sun Microsystems created it. The 3Ss + 1S more model stands for:

• Start small
• Be highly successful
• Make it scalable
• And keep statistics (aka metrics)

Start small: Create the big vision and then break it into smaller components. One way to start small is to limit the new service or resource to a specific group. Can it be introduced to a particular segment of your audience rather than the entire organization? By choosing a group that wants or needs the new service or resource, you are already working with a receptive audience, one that will give useful and constructive advice and observations and will be willing to work out any kinks with you. Which group would benefit most from being a “first adopter”? Would they then be your advocates and supporters?

Be highly successful: Plan for success by defining what success looks like. Is success having a specific group use it and want it to continue? Does success mean that the technology is working seamlessly? Or is success having the new resource embedded into the daily workflow of your users? By defining success before the initiative is launched, you will know when you have reached it.

Make it scalable: A highly successful initiative is one that can grow to meet the demands of potential users. Is there enough staff, funding, technological support and/or support from your internal or external partners as the demand expands? Is there a plan to acquire the needed resources in order to scale?

Keep statistics: Statistics should be both quantifiable and qualitative. How many people are using the new service or resource? How are they using it? What value is it adding to their productivity? What stories are they telling you about its value? Metrics provide the foundation for building a rationale to continue or scale the initiative.

With limited budgets, staff and resources, it’s often daunting to take a risk in changing a process, launching a new service, or introducing a new resource. Think back to your childhood days of playing, experimenting with new techniques, and being fearless and then bring those agile aspects into your daily life. As Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media and innovator recommends, “Try fast, fail fast, keep trying and never give up.”

Cindy Hill is the manager of the Research Library at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She’s a past president of SLA and is currently chairing the 2012 Conference Planning Council. She is a newly selected Commissioner for the Los Altos Public Library and is a part-time faculty member at San Jose State University.  Cindy can be reached at cindyvhill@yahoo.com, tweets @cindyhill and can be found on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/cindyvhill. She’s currently working on her latest 3S + 1S initiative.

by Allan Foster, Europe Chapter and Business & Finance Division

For more years than I care to remember I have been charting developments in business information use through an annual survey of information managers. This is the Business Information Survey published each March in Sage’s quarterly journal Business Information Review. The focus of the Survey has changed over time, from a concentration on sources of information to key issues in information management.

The methodology has also changed, from an open, widely distributed questionnaire to a series of in-depth interviews with a small number of senior corporate information managers. These are mainly based in the UK but many work for global businesses and have responsibilities for international services. If I was being pretentious(!) I would describe it now as almost ‘ethnographic’, a series of ongoing conversations with trusted colleagues, trying to chart year on year changes in their services, roles within their organisations and strategic priorities. It has only been possible to do this and to get brutal honesty from respondents by honouring a rule of strict confidence and aggregating results so as to avoid disclosing any identities. Most but not all respondents are involved in the Survey each year. In it’s 21^st year, the 2011 Survey¹ included seventeen of the interviewees from the previous year whilst another four were new participants.

Although the respondents represent a range of corporate information, library & research services, across industrial sectors and of varying sizes, I claim no statistical representativeness whatsoever for the Survey. But, given the seniority and frankness of the respondents, the findings provide a rich narrative of current practice and future intentions. It’s the latter which I’m concentrating on here as a contribution to the ‘Future Ready’ discussion.

Whilst massive turbulence in the business and financial environment is the new norm and technologies change so fast, the Survey results suggest that the crucial ‘future ready’ attitudes and skills in the corporate information scene are and will be in the next five years pretty much the same as those exhibited in successful information services now. This may be a disappointment to the ‘everything is changing’ lobby who are looking for new magic bullets and a cookbook formula to succeed in the corporate information/knowledge management world.

The key approaches and skills that define successful information management, now and in the next few years, amongst the 2011 Survey group of senior professionals, are:

1. Access to, and a good relationship with, senior executives, preferably at board level.
2. ‘Business strategy & culture fit’ – the ability to develop the information service in harmony with the company’s strategic objectives and organisational culture.
3. Developing a shrewd political instinct, having sensitive antennae amongst users and senior managers and being adaptive in consequence.
4. Financial nous – contributing to the increased profitability of the company, streamlining processes and services, reducing costs.
5. The ability to work globally with all that this implies – building alliances, harmonising & integrating services – whilst understanding different cultural and business practices which shape the environment.
6. Develop hard nosed negotiation skills with content vendors. And getting harder.
7. Responding to the growing emphasis on compliance work.
8. Managing capacity & workload, with flexibility and responsiveness.
9. Ensuring that your information/research/knowledge staff are embedded within business project and work teams.
10. Continuing to look dispassionately at alternative organisational and delivery models including outsourcing and off-shoring.
11. Embracing and handling internal ‘know-how’ as well as external data.
12. Enhancing knowledge management skills (note small rather than capitalised ‘KM’) – knowledge sharing, capturing tacit knowledge, using stories, applying appropriate technologies.
13. Use social media when appropriate. A number of respondents are somewhat sceptical of the business case for such deployment in terms of their information and research services.
14. More attention should be given to measuring the impact of the information services (including outsourcing/off-shoring), through ROI and other metrics.
15. New IT systems should be implemented in line with technological opportunities and trends but most of all to improve access to content and cost-effectiveness of services.
16. IS/KM staffing – the most important internal resource of all. Improve communications, provide development opportunities, undertake succession planning.
17. There’s no substitute for persistence and hard work.

1. These and other issues are developed much more fully in “Let’s save the company money” – the new orthodoxy. The Business Information Survey 2011. Business Information Review 28 (1), March 2011.

—————–—————–

Allan Foster (allan.foster@gmail.com) is an information industry consultant and writer, previously Director of Information Services at Keele University and a senior information manager at Manchester Business School, Lancashire Polytechnic, Sheffield Polytechnic and the British Institute of Management. He presented these findings at an SLA Europe session, Is your information service ‘Future Ready’?, in Manchester on 22^nd March 2011.

Karen Sawatzky, Librarian, Tapper Cuddy LLP, Winnipeg, MB

Reposted with permission from Slaw.

Everyone’s talking about the future. From LegalTech New York, where the closing keynote was the practice of law in 2020, to IT’s role in the library of the future, and SLA’s FutureReady365 blog. It’s interesting to be reading about predictions on where our profession may be going. One document I came across a while ago was the Association of Research Libraries’ 2030 Scenarios : A User Guide for Research Libraries. I started reading it (it’s 92 pages!) to see if it had any application for a law firm library.

Can you imagine the world in 2030? I can’t, but the ARL Scenarios do. It’s not quite the future that I would like to see, but then, is the present what anyone predicted 20 years ago? The scenarios envision a world where researchers are free agents, and universities scramble for funding. (Hmm…how is that different from today, at least the second part?) There are four scenarios presented: Research Entrepreneurs, Reuse and Recycle, Disciplines in Charge, and Global Followers. Each one outlines a particular day in the life of a star researcher, Hannah Chen. The world is described slightly differently in each scenario, but varies on the theme that government funding of universities will dry up, mainly due to declining tax revenues, universities will seek more partnerships with businesses, and both students and faculty will be competing for meaningful positions.

So what are the strategic implications of these scenarios? Scenario 1: Research Entrepreneurs, resonated the most with me. Note the following strategic question that arose:

How do we begin now to develop the library professional of the future – a highly capable and credible service provider who can work directly with researchers with data preparation and curation capabilities? What skills are we currently developing in our library professionals that may not be valued in the future? (p. 39)

Replace “researcher” with “lawyer”, and we’re already at this scenario, at least regarding data preparation and curation capabilities (think compiling case law on a point of law, and determining which resources have the authority to be used to develop an argument). As to the skills we’re currently developing that may not be valued in the future – how about some of the audiovisual equipment training! All kidding aside, most of the skills I have are transferable across many occupations, and even something as library-specific as cataloguing can be useful in cross-training to write computer languages.

So how does this relate to the law firm library of the future? I’ve been thinking a lot about the physical space necessary to define the library of the near future, say in the next five years or so. My current space is fairly traditional – lots of shelving for (mostly) reporting series that are no longer collected, and a small work area. I haven’t quite figured out what is the best use of the space if I had the opportunity to renovate. Should there be more social areas, equipped with comfortable chairs and tables, to encourage use of the library as a place to meet and discuss? Or should it be a quiet area, where lawyers can review the resources they need without being disturbed? My personal preference is to see the space become more conducive to conversation – kind of like the lawyers’ lounge without the bar.

There have been a number of discussions of law library space recently. I especially enjoyed Louis Mirando’s posts, Rebuilding a Law School Library. Any ideas on what the future holds for law libraries? Will private firms outsource part or all of them? Or will it be a competitive advantage to house your own knowledge management team? What skills will we need? What does 2030 look like to you?

Karen Sawatzky is a law librarian at a business law firm in Winnipeg, MB. She is passionate about marketing and personal brand building.

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 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.

by R. David Lankes, iSchool, Syracuse University

Why “what is the future of libraries” is a bad question, and a way to start an agenda.

Future Ready from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

R. David Lankes is an associate professor at the iSchool as well as director of the Information Institute of Syracuse (IIS) which houses several high-profile research efforts, including the Educator’s Reference Desk and projects for NSF’s National Science Digital Library. Dr. Lankes co-founded the AskERIC project in 1992 and also founded the Virtual Reference Desk project and was the first fellow of the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy.