Librarian of Fortune

SLA's Alignment Project

I've been following the progress of the Special Libraries Association's "Alignment Project", in which SLA is taking an in-depth and strategic look at how both the association and its members are perceived, what their key value is, and how to communicate that value. What's making it difficult for members to grok is that the project is looking at two different questions:

* what is the key value SLA provides to its members, and what its role should be
and
* what is the key value that SLA members provide to their organization, and what their role should be

The proposal to change the name of SLA is driven from this project, but that's not all the project is about. There are some great insights in there for any info pro. Following are some of my key take-aways so far:

Huge discrepancies exist between what the C-suite values and what value we think we provide. Fascinating – 42% of info pros said their most valuable info role is “conducting research on users’ behalf”, vs. only 19% of users who considered that as the most valuable role. 28% of info pros said “managing a physical library”, vs. just 8% of users. Ditto for evaluating and purchasing content sources, staffing a reference desk, and document delivery -- a lot of us info pros believe that these are our most important contributions, but that's not what our funders value.

And what did users value more highly than we info pros did? Providing CI information, managing internal content, research staff working on project teams, managing a portal or intranet, integrating content into work processes -- all the really value-adding activities we do. These are all "librarian" responsibilities, properly considered, but they sure aren't what most people (including our bosses and the C-suite) think a librarian does.

Interestingly, across the board, the users identify and value the more strategic aspects of our service. We consistently value activities that are required but are not added value.

That's a lot of the value to me of the alignment project so far. It highlights the disconnect between what we think we contribute and what the C-suite values, and it shows the need for us to continue to focus more on adding value rather than on the administrative and search aspects of our profession. That's big stuff, and I'm glad that we have some tangible evidence of the messages we need to bring (and the actions we have to take) to be seen as the strategic assets we are.

The Kameny Papers

At the 2009 annual conference of the Special Libraries Association in Washington DC, the GLBT caucus brought in Charles Francis, a Washingtonian who is a friend of Frank Kameny, a founder of the modern gay movement for civil equality. Francis, apparently single-handedly, arranged to have Kameny's amazing collection of historical material and artifacts appraised, arranged for donors to pay Kameny for the collection (Kameny spent most of his adult life advocating for gay rights... not a lucrative career), and getting the material accepted by the Library of Congress. This project, the Kameny Papers is an amazing effort, even more so because it was spearheaded by one man who knew Kameny.

When the Library of Contress said they'd be interested in this amazing collection of historical material and artifacts from the early gay rights movement of the 1950s, they wrote to Francis:

Accurate history requires primary material created contemporaneously with the events under question. [...] Abstraction is often the enemy of historical understanding.  A comprehensive understanding of history requires that historians, and those who read history, see how government policies and public attitudes affected real individuals and how individuals reacted, adjusted, and grappled with their position. 

Check out the web site to see some of the correspondence Kameny had with various government agencies.

 

"This hurts me more than it hurts you"

I do a fair amount of strategic coaching with fellow info-entrepreneurs as well as corporate and specialized librarians, and one issue that frequently comes up is having to pull back from providing the level of information services that we want to provide. How so?

Early in my library career, the library budget was cut significantly. Our reaction was to cut back on staff, reduce the funding of professional development, and otherwise cannibalize our operation. Then I watched as Congress cut the Department of Interior's budget, which resulted in a severe reduction in the funds for the National Park Service, which is under Interior. How did the NPS react? By making Congress hurt. They very publicly closed the Washington Monument, with a sign directing unhappy tourists to the other end of the Mall, where members of Congress had their offices. It usually took no more than a few days of being flooded by unhappy constituents for Congress to rethink its spending priorities and restore the NPS budget.

I learned from that, and the next time the library budget was cut, the first thing I eliminated was the popular daily news digest. I announced to all the readers why it was being "suspended", and asked for their comments on whether this service should be re-funded. Sure enough, it didn't take long before I had the budget restored. It's not a pretty process, but neither is eating into the behind-the-scenes budget and not allowing library clients to see the impact of the lost funding. Instead, bringing all the library's stakeholders into the discussion ensured that the people who held the purse strings knew that we had a posse.

I just put this principle of "share the pain" into action again, but it was hard. I extensively edit a client's newsletter which she sends out to her key contacts. She recently had to cut my budget significantly and we agreed that I would do only a small amount of high-level editing instead of my full editing services. I still find myself tempted to just tweak the wording a little bit to make it clearer, or dig into the web sites of a company she is profiling, or just clean up this chart a little... Then I remind myself that, if she can't see a significant drop in the amount of editorial support I give, she will never bump me up to my original fee. So I sit on my hands as I read, now, and just keep reminding myself that the only way she will decide that my editorial skills are worth the added expense is to be without them.

Making the most out of a professional conference

The Special Libraries Association blog has a good piece on "tips for making the most out of an SLA conference". Most of the tips go beyond SLA -- they're useful in whatever professional development conference you attend.

Among the tips that I thought were most relevant (and most needed, IMO):

• Have at least two sessions chosen for every time slot. That way, if you get to one and the room is overflowing or the topic isn't what you thought it would be, you can make the most of your time by heading to your second choice.
• Try to attend a few sessions outside of your area or specialty.
• Bring 50-60 business cards. Be ready to distribute them to people who ask or who want to trade.
• At sessions, sit in the front so a speaker notices you. Don’t be afraid to speak up and ask questions and be noticed. Network.
• When you attend a session, don’t sit with friends. Sit down and meet someone new on either side of you, since you never know where this will lead.

The tips were written by Special Libraries Association board members Ann Sweeney and Ruth Wolfish. Great job, Ann and Ruth!

Legal Research Engine

If you want to search the best of the legal web (OK, I mean that portion of the web that has law-related content), a nice tool I use is the Legal Research Engine, created by the Cornell Law Library.

You can limit your search to legal research guides, the best of the legal web, and/or academic blawgs from law professors.

What I really like about this site is that it's clear, easy to use, and a great example of what any information center or independent info pro could do for a client group. These are "just" Google custom search engines -- very well-designed, well-tuned search engines, but the capacity is there for anyone to build a similar resource on a topic they are equally familiar with.

Living Large in Lean Times

An article I wrote just came up on the web: Living Large in Lean Times. (Searcher, March 2009) The intended audience is info pros, and I focused on how to act strategically when faced with a tough economy. The headings say it all:

• Take the 5-Year View
• False Economy
• Short-Term Fixes Versus Long-Term Payoffs
• Make Yourself Recession-Proof
• Living Large on Your Own (for the info-entrepreneurs among us)

Social Media Intelligence Cheat Sheet

I recently learned about How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic, which appeared in ReadWriteWeb, a splendid Web technology news blog.

"We'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web."

This is a 13-step outline of how to determine.. well, what the blurb above promises. This is a fabulous cheat-sheet for any info pro who needs to know how to mine the blogosphere. (Yes, it's more than just Technorati!) The author of this post doesn't have a library/research background, but it's written specifically for info pros.

It sometimes lapses into techno-geek, but the structure is IMO spot on:

• Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field
• Rank the Blog Posts With Robots
• Banish Content Overload
• Check out the Hotness
• Make a Reference Search Engine
• Discover Community Leaders Elsewhere, Too

Great cheat sheet!

Shameless commercial

I'm giving two half-day workshops in conjunction with the annual conference of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) that may be of interest to other info pros as well.

These will be held on Wednesday, March 25 in Albuquerque NM. The morning workshop is Speaking for Fun and (More Importantly) Profit: How to Build Your Business and Your Bottom Line Through Public Speaking and the afternoon workshop is Making Information Actionable: Transforming Your Deliverables for Added Value. Here is more info about both workshops.

And note that, if you can't make it to the conference, I also offer a one-on-one phone version of the workshop. Ping me if you'd like to talk about this option.

Thank you for your attention. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

SLA candidate

I'm running for SLA Division Cabinet Chair-elect. It's a big commitment and I'm honored to have been nominated.

Every librarian/math geek's dream

I've been reading Indexed, a delightful book of hand-drawn charts, graphs and - yes! - even Venn diagrams that "make fun of some things and sense of others". Jessica Hagy, who also blogs these gems at Indexed blog, has an amazing knack for distilling thoughts into simple images, each of which fit on a single index card.

Take today's, for example. It'll take you a minute to parse out this diagram, and then...wham!
 
[For those of you who prefer text:
Big Budget + Big Names = Box Office Flops
Big Names + Big Events = Massive Layoffs
Big Budget + Big Event = Gastric Bypass Surgery
Big Budget + Big Event + Big Names = Today in DC]